Ask HN: Review our app: masterbranch.com

15 points by masterbranch 16 years ago | 13 comments

Hi HN We would like to have some feedback about the app we are building.

Masterbranch is a site which makes CVs for developers based on their real experience (Open Source by the moment). In a future there will be tools for people who haven't worked in open source. Now we are focusing in supporting different forges and with time keep growing and giving support for more but we are also trying to polish what we already have.

We have few employers registered, and they think the service might be nice and useful, but we would like to know more about how other developers like us see the site, what they like, what they dislike... Any feedback is welcome and appreciated :)

Our aim is to be useful for developers to get great and cool jobs and give employers a good tool for hiring talent and to reduce the hiring error in technical recruitment.

Thank you for your kind attention

Cheers

savant 16 years ago |

I'm interested in seeing how you classified a developer in certain categories.

I just searched my Github profile (I am josegonzalez on Github, savant elsewhere) and noticed on the sidebar that it had a bunch of links to types of developers. One of them was "CakePHP Developers". How did you categorize me in this section, and will you make such methods known? I'm curious as I run CakePackages.com (http://cakepackages.com) and your algorithm is pretty accurate. Since part of that particular app is indexing CakePHP-related code AND developers, it would be nice to see how you are categorizing developer's repositories (I've been thinking of using PHP's reflection class to do categorizing for my purposes, but I want to know how to auto-find CakePHP developers themselves...)

I love the idea, and as soon as I sort out my OpenID provider (HEY ADD FOAF+SSL SUPPORT!), I'll be signing up for this service :)

masterbranch 16 years ago | |

Hi, For the algorithms our inspirational reading was "Programming Collective Intelligence" http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529321

As all the recommendation algorithms the basis is the text, and dictionaries with technologies, and of course a long time blacklisting words by hand.

We didn't think about ssl but, could be a nice feature. Is already wrote down in our roadmap. I like it.

About http://www.foaf-project.org/ give me some days and I'll put it. I can tell you when this is done through GitHub's message system.

We are really appreciating and considering every ideas all of you are giving here. Thanks a lot.

jswinghammer 16 years ago |

Recently I wanted to hire a consultant for an open source project. I had no idea how to do this because there's no easy way to find out who the right people are and who is interested in working on bug fixes that are interesting to me as a corporate user of their work. I googled and found that the project I needed work done on had a page for this but I only found it by searching (and I didn't expect to find anything when I did).

Maybe there are sites out there that do this and I'm just unaware of them. It seems like if you can solve that problem you'd have a nice feature on your hands. Maybe it's a separate site from what you're doing now. Don't know. It seems like it might be a common problem for people wanting to use a variety of open source tools and aren't plugged into the developer community for that project.

Just a thought I had today and I saw your site trying to do something related so I figured I'd share it. Good luck.

stevenwei 16 years ago |

Hey this is a great idea. I know I'd rather hire from a pool of open source developers whose contributions I can take a look at ahead of time.

I think your biggest challenge is not in finding employers, but getting the community of developers registered on it. I would probably position it less as a job hunting site and more as a 'show off your projects' type site. Once you get enough developers on the site then adding a job board section becomes a no brainer.

Have you thought about integrating StackOverflow as well? E.g. not just the code they've written, but the programming advice they've given.

masterbranch 16 years ago | |

We have been thinking about StackOverflow info, but we have some doubts about it. How to measure, how to compare it with the code info, etc. We prefer first work with the code, trying to "do one thing a time and do it well". Nevertheless hopefully in a not very long time we will try to start giving tools to improve CVs with non FOSS.

Regards

tomazmuraus 16 years ago |

I came across this website a few days ago and I like the idea and execution so far :)

In my opinion, you should be able to manually edit project description and add extra information to it.

Also more forges like lauchpad, ohloh? and others are needed.

P.S. At what rate do your spiders crawl GitHub and other websites?

It looks like that many projects with recent updates are missing.

masterbranch 16 years ago | |

Glad to hear about you like the idea.

We will add more forges, it is in our roadmap.

Crawling speed depends on the forges and if we have the project info or if is pending to be got for the first time.

Hopefully, the speed will become more stable and new projects, and contributions come up earlier in Masterbranch.

ELV1S 16 years ago |

http://www.masterbranch.com/developer/nv/139036 "NV has worked in 2 Open Source projects."

It's not true. http://github.com/NV — 27 repositories.

masterbranch 16 years ago | |

Hi. We do not have all the projects yet, but they will be there soon.

bradfordw 16 years ago |

Forgive my ignorance, there is talk of "CV" or "CVs" everywhere on the site. Without googling for it, I would have no idea what it was or is. I think it's an overused abbreviation on your main and about pages.

masterbranch 16 years ago | |

Hi, We now that in the US the most used word is resume, but CV is widely used in the rest of the world.

bwh2 16 years ago | | |

I actually first thought the site was about version control, given the name and the CVs references (which I assumed was a typo).

MrMatt 16 years ago |

clickable link: http://masterbranch.com