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Ask HN: Where to find co-developers for side projects?

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Re: Ask HN: Where to find co-developers for side projects?

#21

Post by Raphmedia »

Liberator wrote: post #15
sharemywin wrote: post #13

Maybe you can talk about what your looking to create. Or, maybe build it as an API and people find it useful and build front ends for it.

Well, I'm looking to build a modern and robust opensource anonymous imageboard software (most people here probably know about 4chan), as all the existing usable alternatives are written in PHP and the code is 10 years old and barely maintained. Yes, maybe I will try to do the front end by myself and also provide rest api on the side, if anyone was interested.

Do the back end, make a barebone frontend with bootstrap and open source it. If your product is interesting, you should be able to attract people to help you out improve the frontend.

You can get pretty far with bootstrap before hitting a wall.

Re: Ask HN: Where to find co-developers for side projects?

#22

Post by hamstercat »

Find local hackathons in your city. In mine I can find some on http://meetup.com. That way you get together with strangers, work on something for a day or a weekend or whatever, and there's no pressure after that. You'll get to learn new things and make connections at the same time.

EDIT: thanks for the correction, it's meetup.com not meetings.com

Re: Ask HN: Where to find co-developers for side projects?

#23

Post by andrewmcwatters »

This is really low effort. If you think this is a chore maybe you just shouldn't do it. You sound like an ideas guy who doesn't want to do work. You also sound like you basically want other people to work on your side project. Maybe you should start something first. People are more willing to help those who help themselves.

Re: Ask HN: Where to find co-developers for side projects?

#25

Post by pythonaut_16 »

Liberator wrote: post #15
sharemywin wrote: post #13

Maybe you can talk about what your looking to create. Or, maybe build it as an API and people find it useful and build front ends for it.

Well, I'm looking to build a modern and robust opensource anonymous imageboard software (most people here probably know about 4chan), as all the existing usable alternatives are written in PHP and the code is 10 years old and barely maintained. Yes, maybe I will try to do the front end by myself and also provide rest api on the side, if anyone was interested.

One bit of advice, don't go for React/Angular/front-end unless you actually need to or you actually want to.

Whatever web framework you're using (probably some variation of Spring if you're using Java) should have built in templating which should be more than sufficient to build an MVP/Proof of concept imageboard. I doubt 4chan is running any kind of SPA either.

Then if your project is successful or you want to stick with it, you can build your frontend javascript app as a phase 2. In most webframeworks you'll do largely the same query/controller work to get the data for both a JSON API and a templated web page. The API will just map that data to JSON while the templated page will map the values into an HTML response.

Re: Ask HN: Where to find co-developers for side projects?

#26

Post by eeZah7Ux »

hamstercat wrote: post #22

Find local hackathons in your city. In mine I can find some on http://meetup.com . That way you get together with strangers, work on something for a day or a weekend or whatever, and there's no pressure after that. You'll get to learn new things and make connections at the same time. EDIT: thanks for the correction, it's meetup.com not meetings.com

you mean meetup.com?

Re: Ask HN: Where to find co-developers for side projects?

#27

Post by sophacles »

I can think of a couple routes to this:

* find various organizations devoted to this. Even the small town I live in has a "design society", a python users group, a generic "coder group" and so on. Often groups like this have hack times - just get together, work on your own stuff, but have other people with different skillsets there too to help, co-learn or whatever!

* Find local hackathons - these are a bit more intense but many of them are not primarily contests etc, but just a short-term version of the above

* Find your local (hacker|maker)space.

* Put out an ad in the Craigslist gigs (computer).

If these resources don't exist for you, consider starting them!

Story-time: I was perusing the local Craigslist and came across a person who had put up a tutoring gig - she wanted someone to teach her flask in a structured way. I replied that I'd be willing to share my experience and co-learn, but not really structured and because of my obligations and conflicts of interest I couldn't take payment. Instead I suggested we do the co-learing and experience sharing as a Python Users Group. The one that previously existed in our town had been defunct for several years at that point, and I wanted to see it happen so people didn't need to offer money for learning resources. Long story short - that pug has been around for 5 years now and is still going strong. I'm only involved as an attendee once a month or so, and the other person who founded it coordinates the hack sessions, but new folks have stepped up and filled in the rest of the roles!

Good luck with your adventure - if you have to go the "start a thing" route: warning it's a lot of work, but rewarding. If that happens and you could use advice/experience feel free to reach out:

   $HN_USERNAME@$GOOGLES_FREE_MAIL_SERVICE

Re: Ask HN: Where to find co-developers for side projects?

#28

Post by davchana »

nfriedly wrote: post #12

This might not be the answer you're looking for, but if you don't already have someone in mind, then you should probably build you side project on your own. Also, basic html and css is all it takes to build a webpage. (Well, technically you don't even need the CSS...) JavaScript is definately not required. Responsive CSS is a bit nicer to have to make the website mobile-friendly, but this is all you really need: * {m…

Thats a genius idea for making sure none of the elements goes our of viewport width. I always had this issue that a div has standard border padding, and width:100% pushes its right to out of viewport. Can't wait to try this.

Just few genuine questions, as I am learning, specifically in making static fixed header bars for few of my fun projects.

Does the meta tag in ur comment needs closure(>), or is it something I might have never come across?

Does implying a max-width 100 in percentage means every element gets max 100% of "its" parent element, which can be traced down back to HTML as super parent of all tags, and thus if I could use "vw" viewport width as units instead of %?

Re: Ask HN: Where to find co-developers for side projects?

#29

Post by eeZah7Ux »

Raphmedia wrote: post #21
Liberator wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I'm looking to build a modern and robust opensource anonymous imageboard software (most people here probably know about 4chan), as all the existing usable alternatives are written in PHP and the code is 10 years old and barely maintained. Yes, maybe I will try to do the front end by myself and also provide rest api on the side, if anyone was interested.

Do the back end, make a barebone frontend with bootstrap and open source it. If your product is interesting, you should be able to attract people to help you out improve the frontend. You can get pretty far with bootstrap before hitting a wall.

...or something less heavy.

Re: Ask HN: Where to find co-developers for side projects?

#30

Post by le-mark »

Liberator wrote: post #14
nfriedly wrote: post #12

This might not be the answer you're looking for, but if you don't already have someone in mind, then you should probably build you side project on your own. Also, basic html and css is all it takes to build a webpage. (Well, technically you don't even need the CSS...) JavaScript is definately not required. Responsive CSS is a bit nicer to have to make the website mobile-friendly, but this is all you really need: * {m…

Yeah, if I don't find anybody, I will try to do it by myself. The backend will be made in Spring and I thought about using some template engine, like Thymeleaf to do the front. But I'd prefer to work with REST APIs.

I'm a long time backend java developer who has always struggled with frontend tech. The situation today is actually pretty nice; with bootstrap (or other) you can get a "decent" looking site with very little effort (ie better than raw html). And if you just want to work with API, there are a few jquery ui base widget libraries around[1] I've used in SPA's before. Good luck!

[1] http://www.jeasyui.com/

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