Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings.)

I'm not a developer so I don't think I would be a good mentor for you. However, if you ever want someone to bounce business/marketing stuff off, I'm always happy to help. @daniellicht

You should focus more on your product and building your brand.

just my 2 cents.

I find people often build things because they are possible and interesting but unless you solve a problem they don't add a lot of value and therefore don't get used.

Separately, Brian Breslin (who's been involved here for quite a few years now) has recently written a blog post about it that is another perspective on it: http://brianbreslin.com/on-building-a-community/

I've also been talking about writing this post for some time now and have never found the time to dig in and do it, but I'll mention some of the highlights that I'd discuss:

- There is an overwhelming interest from many different parts of the community (even those outside of tech) to grow the entrepreneurial and technical skill here in South Florida. City development, local business, chamber of commerce, non-profits, universities, and individual leaders are all quite active in putting on events and getting really great people involved here. (Case-in-point: Rasmus Lerdorf just gave two talks about PHP this week. Zed Shaw was in town back in March for Miami Tech Week. Dave McClure was here some weeks ago at a Biz Dev/VC conference.)

- There are people looking for talent and qualified talent is still difficult to find. I'm personally looking for CTO/entrepreneurs for the two groups I'm advising. Both have some capital and have a strong likelihood of success, IMHO. Companies are hiring here as well! Well established companies doing interesting work! (Senzari, for example, is based in Miami.) It wouldn't be hard to find work, if you aren't picky. And if you have time, you can find a really interesting job within months.

- The community wants to be stronger; to be on par with the likes of NY, Boston, Seattle, SV; but they don't always get involved. Turn-out at events is really hit and miss depending on location, timing and topic matter. I attribute this to a few things: poor city layout making it difficult to get people outside of a 10-15 mile radius to your event, good intentions and no follow-up...

- The tech leadership doesn't support each other as much as I think they should. If you're well-connected and know the right people, there's sure to be resources shared; but otherwise, there's a lot of work that community organizers needs to make to coordinate events and pool efforts across the community.

- Despite these things, the leadership here puts together really great events on a consistent basis: TEDxMIA (http://tedxmia.com) , SuperConf (http://superconf.net), Refresh Miami (http://refreshsofla.org), South Florida Hack and Tell (my own meetup) (http://hackandtell.org), a whole slew of events on http://miamitechevents.com/ and they keep coming!

Overall, I think South Florida could be a really successful area to live in professionally. The momentum as been positive and people definitely care. If I had an extra 5-10 hours a week, I would dedicate that to helping the community become more cohesive and better connected. There's no reason why events couldn't be cross-promoted and sponsorship within the community be more prevalent than it is today.

- The site is quite text heavy. This is probably not a big issue for those highly-motivated to use the site, you're going to discourage use from the casual crowd...which seems to be a big attribute that your site promotes. Casual, self-paced learning. Right?

- The various functions don't seem to be tied together in a very meaningful way. They are all partitioned and activity in one part doesn't seem to surface anywhere else. If you're looking for engagement, this is important. Take a look at Stackoverflow. Practically ANYWHERE you touch on that site will surface additional value to others on the site. Votes will bump old questions. Comments alert the OP that you had something to say. Adding tags expands the reach of specific questions.

- I think you want other people to add content to the site as well, but it's not immediately clear on the best way to do that.

- Everyone on your site is a Twitter account...and that's probably not the perspective you want your users to have on each other. Looking at SO again, their profile tags are quite expressive about the value they add to the community at a glance. This is the target you want to shoot for.

- Making DIYComputerScience an auxiliary tool for your resume is a good idea, but as it stands right now this is not something I would want to use to represent me professionally. I know this is probably still young, but if this is going to be one of your value propositions you're going to have to shine. Again, SO has careers.stackoverflow.com and those layouts are VERY nice and does a great job of pulling in experience/value that you've added from their StackExchange sites. (I use them almost exclusively for my online resume.)

I'm going to give advice that I give to any startup who is entering a crowded market. Your PRIMARY differentiation will be your user's experience. It's good that you realize this and am making it your goal. Here's a great answer on Quora which touches on this exactly: http://www.quora.com/Internet-Startups/Should-I-focus-on-a-g...