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

I very much agree with tarekayna about your verbose descriptions. Your resume needs to be scannable so individuals can quickly assess whether you are worth exploring further. Think of the resume as getting your foot in the door. You don't want them to know everything about you, but they should get a good idea of your highlights and best moments. You'll have a lot of opportunity to elaborate further during your follow-up interview.

Personally, I'm not a fan of the way Linkedin lays out your experience. I understand what a great tool it can be and that many people use it. But for presenting an online resume for myself, I've been using StackOverflow Careers. Take a look at how I've laid out my resume there. (http://careers.stackoverflow.com/mikegreenberg) Note how I bring attention to the important parts with appropriate formatting, give very short descriptions which demonstrate action (begin with verbs!), show metrics where possible to show how I improved the company I worked for, and tried to identify the best ways I could be beneficial to them.

I can see the lacking degree working against you in some respects, but I really don't feel this is going to prevent you from getting a job if you're qualified to perform it. But I'm also not saying jobs will land in your lap. You need to compensate for that "hole" in your resume with a significant showing of your own. A portfolio, if you will. Do side projects whenever possible. (I know this can be difficult with a family. I have two kids myself, but I tend to be married to a project when I'm not spending time with them.)

If you have any specific questions, I'd be happy to answer. Or email me in private, if you prefer. (my initials at nobulb.com)

Lance!

Great execution on this site. Very simple and straight-forward. I was not confused or lost at any step in the process. I'm pretty happy with the business model as well. I'm guessing you make a commission on the offer made by the service providers that bid on my jobs?

Your website is clean and straight forward. No distractions. It would seem you're having a hard time getting service providers to give offers. I'm seeing a lot of views but few offers being made. You didn't really ask, but I'm assuming you have a way to target these individuals.

My only observation was that your heuristics for determining an appropriate category were pretty off. I did pick a task that didn't seem to fit anything appropriate, so I'm not sure if my case was more an exception than the norm. Otherwise, I really like everything about this flow and onboarding. I think you ask for just the right amount of information when it's needed and don't force the user to commit to anything too early. IMHO, great job!

You are attempting to create an authority on a programmer's reputation/clout. A good way to spread this, and a feature I'd like to see, would be a simple API that gets the key stats (maybe not all) from your service. Maybe something that could generate a badge the programmer could include on their site. You're doing the work of pulling in data from SO, Github, Bitbucket, but don't offer much back to the user (aside from some self-affirmations that they can only access on your site). Exposing this data for others to use in interesting ways might be a good way to generate the authority you're attempting to create. (Not to mention the instant social-proof of programmers advertising their generated score on other sites.)

That said, I don't personally find that these services give very accurate depictions of a user's value. An arbitrary score means little without a control or reference point. (What would Linus Torvalds score?) Further, services like these typically rely on some secret-sauce to generate their numbers... and obfuscating this process lends itself to further skepticism of that value of your score. This is not an attack on your product specifically. I feel this equally about Klout, which I've ranted about elsewhere.

The problem services like yours should attempt to solve (IMHO) is indicating what qualities your score represents. This needs to be as clear and simple as possible. The best utility your service could offer will be in the following use case: A stranger, who is completely unaware of your scoring system, requests and consumes a report you generated for a user quickly; and to walk away with a strong sense of how that programmer relates to the metrics they care most about. Agreed, this is no small feat. But it's what services like BBB, Consumer Reports, and the like have spent years establishing their authority and clarifying their signals.

Hope this was food for thought. (Take it with a grain of salt. What the hell do I know anyway.)

Our engineering society at school provided tutoring and workshops for test prep on major exams. PE, GRE, and some industry specific certifications. I would imagine there are other organizations who provide tutoring and workshops for other tests as well. This is primarily what I'm talking about and will likely be competition for you.

Alright, I made it most of the way through the 4th floor, and then the monsters became a bit overwhelming... I'll try again later but I feel I have good handle on the game.

- Harest part for me was the learning the hotkeys. Most game designers will layout the slots to mimic the location of the hotkeys on the keyboard. I note that the right-side spells start from hotkey 1 and the bottom quick-items continue where the right side left off. You might find it more intuitive if you laid them all across the bottom and put less space in between the icons. To make it easy to visually determine which hotkey each button is, you could group them in sets for 5. For example: [1][2][3][4][5]__[6][7][8][9][10]

- Consider reducing the size of the buttons for the INV, MAP, and CHAR. These are usually mapped to [I]NV, [M]AP, and [C]HAR as you have them so seasoned players will not have trouble opening them. Hotkeys will be displayed on mouse over anyway for newbies and you'll regain more of your play area.

- With the MAP, INV, and CHAR buttons reduced, you can remove the left bar and leave the portrait of your character as a floating box in the top right, if you like.

- The level of your character can be simply a number in the top corner of the portrait. Players understand this is the level of the character. And you can make this more obvious on level up, this number could GLOW briefly.

- Health is probably the most important stat. I'd probably emphasize it by making it thicker, or longer (or both?).

- Sometimes, I see items disappear (I'm assuming because there are two of them and you just drop them). Maybe you give the player a few points of XP or a gold piece for the trouble. It sucks to find some treasure and it's of no use to you at all. At least you can get a consolation prize. :)

What do you think?