Me and Aneesh have been working hard on an idea I described here a few weeks ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=450810): a site where you propose small coding projects and others can join. The goal is meeting new people and sharing tips while working on fun ideas. We've added a voting twist: you can vote for ideas, and then showcase completed projects on your blog for people to vote up.
We think some of you will be directly interested in this, and we hope for your feedback:
Unfortunately, there were a lot of hoops! I had to register. Once registered I wasn't logged in?! I confirmed my e-mail then logged in, then clicked new project. Most of this went well except for the tags, where the auto-complete broke (would show the tag I had just typed, over the textbox I'm trying to type into). That might just be a Google Chrome issue?
My $0.02:
You should optimize the hell out of the new user -> adding a project loop and the new user -> joining a project loop. User accounts are stupid and antiquated. Have the add project field use the same fields that wordpress comments use (name, e-mail, optionally website). Defer dealing with misuse (hopefully defer it until you're popular!)
OK so the registering process should now be much easier (for better or for worse -- we'll deal with misuse as it shows up, as you said). It's not as good your comment and shimon's propose, but it should at least be much faster: no activation, direct to profile.
Go to a website, comment on it and watch your feedback be used to evolve the website... in under half an hour! There are even comment threads where PG has a <5min read-hack-deploy-announce cycle on HN itself.
I imagine it was the inspiration for the site design but it's worth noting that your design is very reminiscent of stackoverflow. That's not a bad thing, however, because it looks great and very usable. Thanks for this!
Add location information to users. I'm more likely to work on a small project with someone local. Also, local user groups are doing this already, if you add location info they could use your software.
Agree! Its quite hard to meet new friends in person when you start working full time. I'd love a place where I can meet and work on small projects with new coders. But my intention would be to meet potential co-founders so having geo tagging of some sort can be really helpful.
That's exactly what we had in mind for the site: a way for people with restrictive schedules to meet other technical people in a project context (seeking cofounders is a perfect example of the need). We'll work on integrating geographic info.
If you need location information I have a ton of it already at hackrtrackr.com, tell me what you need and maybe i can set you up a feed. bradleyt dot marsh at gmail
I think this is a great idea. I have always thought hacking and open source development could be more organized :-) This looks like a great first stab. Here are some comments:
On aesthetics: although I like the StackOverflow nod, I think the color scheme is a little too 'grey'. Background is grey, headers are grey, tags are grey, buttons are grey. Don't know if other HNers have the same sense.
Specific improvements:
- on the "Add Project" page, you could make the text fields a little bit bigger
- rather than picking the # of hours you think it would take for 2-3 people, why don't you use the fibonacci-like sequence used in Story Point / Planning Poker estimation. E.g., it's a scale of complexity: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 25, 50 100. See planningpoker.com. You could also consider using a 'slider' here.
- After I posted my clusterify project idea, I realized I had made a mistake in the Markdown. Can we get a preview feature? How about editing existing submissions? (I understand this is early stage :-))
- The mistake I made is that I thought that links that are on their own line should be linked automatically. I guess this isn't strict Markdown, but seems like a common enough convention in most text-to-html systems.
- Since this is code-focused, you could make google-code-prettify available for syntax highlighting (or something similar):
- The "vote up" feature should be available on the front page, rather than only being available in the right side "project control" section once you click on a project
- Speaking of, I think you should move "Project Controls" to the top of the project page. It's hard to find them on the right side.
Some "pie in the sky" new features to consider:
- Someone mentioned integration with code hosting services like Github: that could be very cool
- Having the project proposal be a Wiki rather than an original proposal with comments
- Google maps (or similar) integration to schedule meetings
I'm definitely going to keep visiting. It's a great idea. Keep it up. And if you're interested in working on a Python project, I've proposed one!
I said "Google maps," but I obviously meant "Google Calendar" :-) Was playing with geodjango today, had maps on my mind...
But that made me think of one other thing. When I first saw this website, I thought that you might have been focused on in-person meetups for hacking sessions. Obviously, a local meetup has limited appeal until you have a more diffuse userbase, but I still think it wouldn't be a bad idea to support 'local' clusterifies in some way. I'm going to try posting one and see what happens.
Hey pixelmonkey, thanks for the great feedback! google-code-prettify looks like a cool idea.
> After I posted my clusterify project idea, I realized I had made a mistake in the Markdown. Can we get a preview feature?
You can just edit the project idea -- there's a link to do that on the project page.
> The "vote up" feature should be available on the front page, rather than only being available in the right side "project control" section once you click on a project
This is by design for now -- we want people to actually read a project before voting it up.
> Google [Calendar] (or similar) integration to schedule meetings
After seeing the feedback here, supporting events & in-person meetups is something we want to do. We're thinking about the best way to support this, and should have something new for you guys before too long.
I like this not just because it's fun to meet up and hack with other folks, but because it gives people a way to post/discuss/brainstorm ideas. It's always more fun to discuss these things in an open, social setting where the emphasis can be on improving ideas and generating new ones, and can draw people away from the traps of being possessive and defensive about their ideas.
Your main challenge is likely to be getting enough volume on there to keep it interesting. You might try making a dramatically more lightweight way to participate -- a simple "What would you like to build?" prompt where people can type an idea anonymously and other users can vote on the idea, comment on it, or turn it into a proposal.
In general, you need to find a much more concise way to explain how I get involved and what the benefit is than a 150 word "basic concepts" page. Probably there should be a new proposal form that I can see and fill in before registering, and that form should be designed to explain clusterify as I fill it in.
The principle behind having people registering to post was to make it less confusing. At first we wanted to separate "ideas" and "implementations", so an idea could have many implementations and indeed you could have had anonymous ideas. Maybe we could still have a list of "parentless" projects up for grabs.
I like the idea of a proposal field with instructions. It could still be part of the registering process (it either ends up anonymous or as yours, depending of what you decide). I'll ponder on this.
Add 'in progress'/'started' as a project status. This would affect some other features as well, for example filtering the project list. But it would allow people to find new projects more efficiently.
Also add a field for 'time to finish' once the project is done.
Allow sorting or filtering projects by est. time. If I don't have more than 4 hours, I don't want to see any projects that take longer. Additionally, in the 'New Here' section: Clusterify: work on fun, small (~2hr) projects and meet other coders. '2hr projects' is not very relevant - a lot of projects listed are est. time >2 hours, and it really depends on the quality/quantity of people who join.
Do you want to explicitly specify a limit on the number of people who join? Once the limit is reached the project can move to 'In Progress' status. The project submitter can approve join requests.
Thanks for the suggestions! Actually the intention was to make project administration happen through comments, but indeed some common pieces of information are likely to come back in every project and allow for better filtering and smoother/more straightforward project progression.
As for project length, the core idea is for projects to have low time demands, and "small" can be interpreted in many ways. Maybe we should change that to "a few hours", though.
So when a project is completed, it gets pulled off the proposed page? Or you just didn't populate the proposed page w/ the Clusterify project?
Maybe projects should never 'complete', i.e. be removed from the 'proposed' page. Reason: it might be fun to be able to look at multiple implementations of the same idea.... different little groups' 1/2 hr takes on a given notion.
Eventually, maybe it turns out that the most interesting ideas are the ones that the most people bother to make an implementation of, and this could be a sorting criterion when browsing for ideas.
Yes, right now when a project gets completed, it is moved off the proposed projects list. We had a lot of discussion about having multiple implementations of a particular idea, and ultimately thought it might be too confusing. From the feedback here, it seems we may revisit that.
I like the simplicity of your site as it stands, just throwing an idea out there.
The first thing one does when one sees a good idea is to think about how it could be elaborated on -- that's probably the nature of a lot of the feedback you're getting here -- but if you had all those features in your initial mockup, it would be so encrusted that no one would be able to see the good idea any more.
This looks great. I want to open hndir.com with other hackers, I'm fairly busy on another project right now but really like the idea. It's down right now, moving the host to linode.
Honestly, not too sure. I know I wanted to be able to see other hackers from HN at my school. I've gotten a lot of feedback, just wish I had more time (or help) to build it out.
awesome. if you have a group feature, i'll be using it for a hackers meetup here in montreal. we meet monthly and need a tool to aggregate hacker projects. (or maybe use tags?)
Yeah, this is definitely a use case we're interested in supporting. One solution is to use a particular tag, but we'd love to add something more useful & targeted. If you have any thoughts on what this should look like, shoot me and fsav an email!
Ah d'accord! Bien, je suis toujours interesse de voir ce que d'autre etudiant ou nouveau gradue font! Il y a definitivement un manque d'interet pour le web a McGill.
Hey I just saw you're the one behind Review Robot. I saw your presentation @ CUSEC/Democamp last month. Prior to working on Clusterify I was developing an iPhone app (which I still haven't got around to publishing), so that was quite interesting.
Your tagline is "To assemble ad hoc teams for short coding projects".
You could come up with a semi-unique name like "codelets" ("hacklets", "hackies", "projectiles", ) for these "short coding projects". This would be a unique term specific to and identifying your site, similar to "tweets" identifying messages posted on Twitter.
This is really cool. Taking one look gave me quite a few new ideas.
I'm slightly confused about its focus, though. How is it different from those sites that list webapp ideas? Nothing is stopping me from taking one of the ideas described on this site and just doing it myself...
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody.
Yeah sure you could just run away with other's ideas. But the focus is on meeting others while implementing the ideas.
I guess if you have a revolutionary idea, you better keep it to yourself :P But if you have a small project that'd be useful yet not likely a huge profit maker, by sending it there you can make it an opportunity to meet other programmers.
And it's much easier to generate buzz around your project if you 2-3 trying to do so than if you're alone. That's a reason why we suggest project members describe the project on their blogs when it's done.
hmmmm . . . I wish something like this could get tied into the larger network of meetups. For example . . . how would one get 2600 people to be aware of a system like this?
I'd absolutely see games as a good category of ideas, but very small-scale games. Of course we're not enforcing any time limits, so we'll see how the community actually evolves.
The "few hours" suggestion is due to our original intention: to target people who are busy, yet see meeting other coders as useful (&fun, of course!).
We think some of you will be directly interested in this, and we hope for your feedback:
http://www.clusterify.com
Thanks to all who helped/are helping/will help us!