

 WeekendHacker.net - A place for very small projects - ThomPete
http://www.weekendhacker.net

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SeanDav
I generally refuse to join or explore any further a site that requires me to
enter my email before allowing further access.

From other comments I realise that this appears to be a mailing list, so an
email is kind of the point, but still it could be made a lot more clear.

Just a bit of advice.

~~~
cake
It's just like the websites that require you to login with Facebook first, I
don't like that.

I think it's important to be able to gauge a website without giving out
personal info.

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JulianMorrison
Why not just create it as a Google group?

Edit: seriously, unless you plan to somehow monetize it, having Google do your
sysadmin work, pay for your hosting, and present a well tuned web/email
interface at no cost is a no-brainer. It's early enough in the project you
could ask people to switch over.

~~~
pavel_lishin
How would they curate it?

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JulianMorrison
"Announcement only; Anyone can read the archives. Anyone can join, but only
managers can post messages." -- from the create-a-new-group page.

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ThomPete
Less than 48 hours ago there was a discussion in #startups on irc about
getting help for small projects. It often happens that someone needs help for
something that might take a few days, hours or maybe even less. Often someone
is helpful, I have done my share of quick design mockups for someone and been
helped by others.

But I have also been involved in slightly bigger projects for instance
BrainRacer where I helped getting a landing page up and running fairly
quickly. In exchange mahipal will help med with coding a small iphone app I
want to do.

It just comes up enough that it must mean that more people than me and a few
other would like to participate in small projects like this. So in the spirit
of the WeekendHacker ethos i quickly put together this service and hope that
other people might find it interesting.

<http://WeekendHacker.net> is for those tiny projects or cries for help. You
sign up, get one email a day curated with cool little projects that people
will post. No spam, no BS. Just cool little projects you can join.

~~~
random42
How about making the frequency once a week (every Thursday or Friday), and let
the user specify his area of interest?

~~~
wccrawford
By Friday, I've already got plans for the weekend.

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wccrawford
I just signed up, and this appears to be a mailing list rather than a website.
You should probably tell people that.

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ThomPete
It will be a website it's just that I post through the mailing list. I do
write it in the FAQ but maybe I should be a little more specific. Let me know
if you want to be taken of the list.

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ThomPete
So far almost a thousand signups. Never would have thought so many people
would be interested. I will send out a mail to kick it all off and once I have
fixed the sendmail quota problem I have right now.

~~~
Stuk
What's the ratio of coders to designers?

~~~
nimrody
Probably 1 coder : 10 designers -- at the very least.

Off topic: Would be a _great_ idea to have a "design school for hackers" with
some assignments/critique!

~~~
Cyndre
Should have it set to both instead of same id as designer for designer and
both.

Join the Network <form action="email_processing.php" method="post">

    
    
    			<input type="text" name="email" value="your@email.com"/ class="default-value"><br> 
    			<input type="radio" name="skill" value="1" id="developer"/><label for="developer" class="dev">I'm a developer</label> 
    			<div class="clr"></div> 
    			<input type="radio" name="skill" value="2" id="designer"/><label for="designer" class="des"> I'm a designer</label> 
    			<div class="clr"></div> 
    			<input type="radio" name="skill" value="3" id="designer"/><label for="both" class="des">Both</label> 
    			<div class="clr"></div> 
    			
    			<input class="submit_button" type="submit" value=""> 
    			</form>

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yangez
I made an account just to post this. Hi everyone!

First, I think this is a fantastic idea and I signed up instantly, privacy
issues notwithstanding. Not only can you exchange coding favors and build a
reputation, you can also practice your design and development skills in a
variety of projects, which might be an additional major draw. I can't wait for
this to get underway. This is one of those ideas that I wish I thought of.

That being said, I really think you should explore this idea further and
create a dedicated website for it. A mailing list is great and easy to
maintain and all, but a reputation-based service has to have the appropriate
mechanisms to work well. It wouldn't take that long either.

Envision a site where jobs are listed as they're approved and removed as soon
as they're completed or claimed, with discussion and advice flowing freely
between parties. The site would keep track of projects both requested and
completed by each member, and award appropriate kudos within the community to
encourage and reward participation. People would be able to link to their
profiles, which would display which projects they completed for which sites,
on their resumes or facebooks or whatever. You could make a leaderboard of top
contributors, and perhaps a provider request system that may eventually
involve money. It would be like Elance except eroding the barrier between
"service providers" and "employers" - instead, everyone would be both.

There's tons of potential here. Once you get critical mass, monetization could
go far beyond ads: off the top of my head, you could skim paid projects, offer
premium filtering capabilities and other services to paid premium users, or
even get paid by companies that come knocking on your door wanting to hire
some of your more skilled members. You could maybe even provide a service for
members to tutor other members (serving those who go to your site for
practice) and take a % of that $ too.

I realize this goes far beyond a simple "scratch my back and i'll scratch
yours" paradigm, but I really think you might have something. The cherry on
the top is that some of the smaller features that you might want to add to the
site can actually be crowdsourced to your community :)

So yeah, great idea. A community of developers that interact with and work for
other developers in exchange for the same being done for you? Sign me up.

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hrabago
A potential issue here is agreeing on value. Coding tasks can look _really
easy_ when in fact they can be incredibly complex. I'm not sure a design for a
landing page is the market equivalent of an entire iPhone app.

Edit: typo

~~~
mixmax
Design tasks can look really easy too. It cuts both ways.

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ThomPete
Argh. Lot's of signups. Dreamhost only allow for 100 mails an hour. Will work
on expanding the quota and rest assured you will receive a signup mail soon.

~~~
nimrody
Dreamhost specifically has a "mailing list" feature (called "discussion
lists"). These have no limit on the number of outgoing mails and give users
the option to opt-out of the list.

You can create multiple such lists for different subjects (and there's an API
for managing them in addition to the usual DH Panel controls)

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MatthewPhillips
I like this idea. I currently have a full-time job and am doing 15-20 hours of
consulting a week so my projects are more like "late at night and weekend
nights" projects. This appeals to me.

I would like to see some type of standard agreement around this along the
longs of "I spent 2 hours contributing code that you're using, I get 1% stake
if this thing every gets sold / gets funded".

~~~
omouse
I would prefer it if the agreement were "the code will be released under the
GPL or BSD or MIT licenses and the art will be released under a Creative
Commons license". That way there's no arguments later on about
commercialization of it because the licenses would allow anyone to
commercialize it. So your work helps the world, helps the other person _and_
it helps you if you want to start selling it.

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omouse
Following up on someone's suggestion to make a Google Group, why not make it a
group on RiseUp? <https://we.riseup.net/>

Yes yes I know, it's an activist social network, but the _software_ that runs
it is pretty cool. It's called Crabgrass, <http://crabgrass.riseuplabs.org/>

and it's a nifty social networking tool. The thing that might be useful for
your site is that it has wikis and discussion forums and task-lists built-in.
Another nifty thing is that you can have networks of groups. So you can
organize projects based on things like whether it was for a CodeJam or a
weekend Hackathon or whatever.

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stevelosh
Small feature request: include a plain text version of the email for those of
us still using clients like Mutt. This is what we see at the moment:
<http://d.pr/rj1F>

~~~
uniclaude
I also use Mutt, and just in case you don't know, you can use lynx or elinks
to see html emails inside the client. It's very simple to setup [1].
Nevertheless, it would be nice if people could include plain text versions.

[1]: <http://www.mutt.org/doc/manual/manual-5.html#ss5.3>

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swanson
So how do I add my project/idea? I didn't see a big flashing 'got a project?'
button.

I really like the idea and can't wait to see how it plays out.

~~~
wccrawford
Once you get the email (he explains why you haven't gotten it yet in the
comments here) it gives and email address to send the info to.

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PawelDecowski
<input type="radio" id="designer" value="3" name="skill">

should be:

<input type="radio" id="both" value="3" name="skill">

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orenmazor
I can't get over what a great name choice this is.

can we ask for other kinds of favours? I could use a copywriter with some
design skills…

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orblivion
I will sign up, but here's a problem I forsee: How many here are hoping for
help with your project? (I raise my hand here) Now, how many of us have free
time to spend on other people's ideas? Maybe I'm projecting, and I hope I'm
wrong, but I fear that things will be stacked in the first category.

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chriswoodford
based on all of the feedback here and some of the good ideas that people have
come up with, maybe one of the first projects sent out should be to help you
build out some of the smaller/more simple features. contributing to weekend
hacker will, in theory, benefit everyone involved.

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ThomPete
1500 signups. Projects are beginning to come in. The confirmation mail is an
issue that I am working on solving. So please be patient working in a car on
my way to Berlin. Gotta love technology.

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bricestacey
Your signup form is way at the bottom of the page when I load it in Chrome.
<http://i.imgur.com/C70La.png>

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lfx
You forgot email validation, 'signed in' with blank email.

~~~
timinman
I did the same thing, actually, the value was pre-propagated with
'your@email.com', so that is the email we signed up with.

~~~
ThomPete
sorry it was done in a hurry. I am not a developer just a humble designer.

Is fixing things as we speak.

~~~
wvenable
I think I know what the first weekend project should be...

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ThomPete
Over 2000 signups!

Lots of ideas under way. Will tell more when I send out the first mail.

(Confirmation mails slowly getting out)

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snsr
Signed up. Quick observation; your landing page call to action is below the
fold on sub-27" displays.

