Show HN: Skillswap, a tiny site to help people help each other

http://www.skillswap.in/

by jackfranklin • 13 years ago

62 52 13 years ago

Argorak• 13 years ago

Nice idea, simple and helpful, especially as there are quite a number of interesting offers with different skill groups like "need help with coding, can offer help in writing" already.

jackfranklin11• 13 years ago

Thanks! The idea was to keep it stupidly simple, and not limit what people could ask for / search for. Had a couple of people ask if non web dev topics were allowed - to which my reply was "of course!"

mkl• 13 years ago

Do you have plans to make it work without a Twitter account?

realrocker2• 13 years ago

Good Idea. Well executed. Edit: Hide "Offer My Help" on my own swap(when logged in)

jackfranklin11• 13 years ago

Good spot, thank you. Will add it to the list.

enrmarc• 13 years ago

Fantastic idea! Just out of curiosity, what hosting service are you using?

jackfranklin11• 13 years ago

Currently it's on Heroku, using the free instance and the MongoHQ addon. Find it perfect for little side projects like this, especially when launching at first to see if the idea is any good or not.

joshcrowder• 13 years ago

Great idea! I'm going to sign up

eksith• 13 years ago

This is a brilliant! Excellent execution as well and it brings people together to form connections that can last longer than the current exchange.

This is what we should be seeing more of on HN.

jackfranklin11• 13 years ago

Thank you :)

chrismorgan2• 13 years ago

Something I would really like to see here is use of gender-specific pronoun "he" or "she" instead of "they". Yes, the language has changed so that "they" is acceptable as gender-neutral singular, but it's still regularly jarring, and when the information is or can conveniently be there (you can very easily collect it—male, female or unspecified) it makes it much more pleasant to read.

jackfranklin11• 13 years ago

Do you know how we would go about doing it? (That's not a snarky Q - I genuinely don't know!). I too would love to but I'm unsure as to how to reliably do it - and in the mean time gender-neutral was a safer bet.

chrismorgan2• 13 years ago

You could tie it in with letting the user specify the name to display; changing away from using Twitter handles is probably not a bad thing anyway. Thus you could have as part of the sign-up process:

    1. Call me _________
    2. Refer to me as 
       ( ) male ("he")
       ( ) female ("she")
       (x) gender-neutral or plural ("they")
       ( ) actually, we're a group ("they")

For e.g. Twitter sign-up, you'd auto-fill the first with their username and the second with gender-neutral.

That does sound rather awkward and could hopefully be improved upon. (I added the final option as it occurred to me businesses could use this.)

snoonan• 13 years ago

You can try to avoid it grammatically.

@person is looking for help with PHP. In return, @person can help with CSS.

I like this because it means each sentence is meaningful out of context and can be separately indexed, searched, etc.

kivikakk• 13 years ago

It's probably just be the circles you travel in, but to me it wasn't jarring whatsoever. (I use the singular they in any case when I'm referring to someone whose gender I don't know/a hypothetical person where gender doesn't come into it, or if that's what they want me to use!)

cac042• 13 years ago

The language has changed? Singular "they" has been used in English since at least the 15th century.

jnbiche3• 13 years ago

Exactly. Educated English writers, including Shakespeare, have been using "they" as a gender-neutral third-person pronoun since Middle English. I believe there's even evidence of this in Old English.

It's only been in the past century that proscriptionist grammarians have dreamed up this pedantic rule and sought to eliminate English's sole gender-neutral singular pronoun. But since educated writers and common folk alike have been using "they" as a singular pronoun for centuries before these neo-grammarians dreamed up their rule, it's a hopeless and utterly useless quest.

DjangoReinhardt3• 13 years ago

Good one, beautifully done. Just signed up. :)

Request: Provide an option to delete swaps. Once I've found someone willing to exchange help, maybe I wouldn't want to continue advertising the swap?

Just a thought... :-)

jackfranklin11• 13 years ago

Thanks - that one is absolutely on our list.

DjangoReinhardt3• 13 years ago

In fact, you don't even have to allow delete - you can just let the users 'hide' them. That way, if I want to offer the same swap, I can just 'unhide' it. :-)

Out of curiosity, what's the stack? I read Heroku & MongoDB. I'm guessing it is an Ember.js app?

EDIT: unhide not unidentified. Damn you auto correct!

gp-• 13 years ago

phpmentoring.org

danielrmay3• 13 years ago

Great idea, novel execution.

However - you might want to stick some validation or a moderation step in: the first in the list is currently "necenzurat is looking for help with getting laid. In return, they can offer their help with massage.".

Unless, of course, that is the real underlying intention of the app...

EDIT: After a short think, I think it would be nice to use a similar auto-complete "tag" entry system a la Stack Overflow. This would make entering any number of skills a great deal easier than just a text field.

jackfranklin11• 13 years ago

Yup - spotted and deleted that one.

I think we need some form of being able to flag an entry as spam, and it going into moderation when that happens.

grumps• 13 years ago

I like this... I was just thinking about last night how it would be nice if I could just swap with someone.

I would note you might want to protect against things like "help me get laid" I see it it on the homepage just a moment ago. while a legit request, you'll likely lose users over it. I can imagine there will be other crazy and illegal requests too.

jackfranklin11• 13 years ago

Agreed - going to add some system to enable people to flag entries as spam, at which point they will be removed and undergo moderation.

afandian4• 13 years ago

I know I'm a bit old fashioned about correct use of TLDs. But. Is this for Indians to swap their skills or not? If not, the domain is very misleading.

dbaupp• 13 years ago

"skill swappin'", perhaps?

afandian4• 13 years ago

I'm sure there's an aesthetic argument. But I think there's a stronger correctness and not-misleading-ness argument.

scirahul• 13 years ago

Awesome job, bang on target, no bullshit, good luck!

bjourne• 13 years ago

Awesome. It's a site-idea I have myself been toying with but never gone with. Maybe you can extend the scope of your site beyond programming-related topics? For example, I'd be interested in exchanging driving lessons for programming tutoring.

teh_klev• 13 years ago

Nice one. Would be better if folks asking for help could be made to (or optionally) be a bit more specific about the sort of help they're after.

jscore• 13 years ago

This one is the best:

_vojto is looking for help with Data analytics.

In return, they can offer their help with Relationship advice.

anuragramdasan• 13 years ago

This is amazing. Actually anything that allows people to ask help without being treated badly by other users or mods is something i find amazing.

It would have been much better if there were any way to ask for help without twitter. A simple PM system maybe.

realrocker2• 13 years ago

Already connected to 2 people. You might onto something grand here!

Nicholas_C• 13 years ago

I love this. This is the type of idea/site I aspire to create. Simple, easy, useful.

nimrody• 13 years ago

How about letting people add some more information besides 'skill'. I.e., what sort of project they need help with or what is the scope of the help needed?

shloime• 13 years ago

Brilliant. I'm loving this.

Show HN: Skillswap, a tiny site to help people help each other

Related Stories