Q: What is HackerBuddy?
A: HackerBuddy pairs up people that have startup skills (coding, marketing, design etc) with fellow hackers that could do with their advice. It’s still very much in the early stage, but I’m hoping to slowly improve it over time.
Q: When did you have the idea for HackerBuddy?
A: I had the idea for HackerBuddy around the start of December 2010 – I was really keen to learn Ruby on Rails after reading Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby and HackerBuddy seemed like a simple enough idea to get started.
Q: How long did it take to build HackerBuddy?
A: It probably took just over a month in total, although that did include learning Ruby along the way.
I think it would have probably been much quicker with a team – especially if the team already knew Ruby – but I don’t think I would have learned anywhere near as much as I have. The good thing about working on your own is that, when you need to fix a problem, you have to work it out yourself. It’s frustrating at first, but you end up better off. Having said that, the site would probably have a much better design if there was a team working on it.
Q: How long has the site been live? How is it doing?
A: So far, it’s only been live for a few days! It’s got about 50 people using it so far, and it’s nice to see that some matches have already been made. I’d like to think that it’s helping to introduce cool new start-ups with people that would be interested to help them out a bit and give them some advice.
While I may be speaking prematurely, the site hasn’t fallen over yet which, for me, is a good sign.
Q: What are your plans for the web site? Do you plan on bringing on any team members?
A: I’m going to keep improving HackerBuddy based on any feedback that I get – I’m planning on making sure that it stays quite simple. It’s not designed to do anything particularly fancy – I quite like how it matches people up, swaps their email addresses and then just gets out of the way.
No, not for HackerBuddy – it’s only a small side project, it’s a fun project but not worthy of a team.
Q: What did you use to make your web site?
A: I used Ruby on Rails, Coda and Things for Mac.
Coda seems to be an unusual choice of code editor for Ruby – I remember when I was thinking about learning Ruby, a lot of sites were recommending TextMate and were fairly against Coda. I think times may have changed since those blog posts were published, because I found Coda to be genuinely useful and really pretty slick with handling Ruby code. I may just be biased towards Coda because I’ve been using it for a while though. I really like Things for Mac as a task management tool because it’s really clean and simple, and helps me to prioritise which small and simple tasks I should work on.
Q: Tell us a little about yourself
A: I’m a search marketer by day, which means that I spend most of my time staring at Google result pages. I’m not a particularly good coder, but I plan to change that. It may take some time.
Q: Is there anything about your experiece developing this application you're like to share
A: If you’re learning how to code – there’s only so far reading can take you. Think of a simple, small thing that you’d like to build – and then try and build it. Don’t be frustrated when you can’t get it to do what you want – you’ll crack it eventually, and you’ll be a better coder for it.
Q: Can our readers contact you with more questions?
A: Absolutely! You can track me down on Twitter, you can also get in touch from my blog and lastly, you can sign up to HackerBuddy and see if I’m available to help from my profile page.
Interview Date: Feb 2/6/2011