Review my startup: CodeSnipr.com Learning is easy

10 points by prasanmishra 15 years ago | 8 comments

I am following the startup space since last 4 year. Addicted user to HN. Despite strong interest and motivation never able to startup. I have lots of ideas and spent lot of time learning different programming language. But not able to focus and execute well or some other issue related to day job. Finally thought to give it a try. First thing I thought to build up a team though it is not suggested idea as per HN culture. But my idea is not to hire software developer, rather build a team from scratch. Literally the group I started they have very less exposure to computer or some never touch the keyboard. It's true. Any way it started. Guys are really hard working. I divided the team into groups and started learning small small thing at a time. One started on html,css coding, one guy started gimp, one php, one javascript/jquery, one sql,ubuntu stuff and other helping on marketing. The team expense is not much. $100 running monthly cost of living expense of all 5 people one working part time from home. As English is not the first language we had very hard time to understand the articles and learn the concept behind them. Still we persevere and able to know little bit.

Though we still learning and will continue to learn. We think there are few people like us who will face the same problem as us. And they also want the learning is simple experience. So we started working on the idea for allowing anyone to post a simple code snippet with title and explanation about that code snippet. It's that simple nothing much is there. Only one problem we found how to order those information, becoz new user want the table of content format style. If we allow the user to keep on posting the content it may be random. We didn't found the solution yet. But for the time being we are curating those articles, and making the ordering so that if user click on the HTML and click the basic tab on home page he can see a ordered list of articles. Also very small feature we added like syntax highlighting, and copy the code functionality and basic commenting functionality from user.

Much appreciated any feedback or suggestion to improve the site. And few encouraging word or feedback to keep us motivated and continue to work towards it. This is just the starting from our team and we will be continuing.

Thanks! CodeSnipr team http://www.codesnipr.com Twitter: http://twitter.com/codesnipr

Detrus 15 years ago |

Not bad. I like how a lot of the examples and descriptions are short. Sometimes it would be nice to see how the code functions as part of a larger program, so you could organize snippets by length and by what other snippets it connects to.

Large snippets can have labels on different parts of the code, the specific function might be two lines in the middle, and could be highlighted or labeled. Sometimes small functionality, like changing CSS with javascript is part of a larger function like onClick. A snippet could be for those two things at once and each thing could be highlighted differently.

You could build a rating system for snippets instead of curating them manually. Novice users could say this snippet helped me, and experienced coders could say this snippet is good practice, this not so good. You could also do that for descriptions, get people with good english to rate descriptions, have them suggest improvements to grammar, make them shorter, add versions for expert users or novice users etc.. Each description could be translated to multiple languages as well, seems like something that would help people in your shoes.

You could also organize snippets as a part of a larger program. A program could:

1. Access a database

2. Find all users in a table

3. Add something to each user.

Another program might:

1. Access a database

2. Find users who do Javascript

3. Add something to each user.

These are slightly different programs but very common tasks, you can link in more tasks into these "multi-snippets."

Good job so far, looks like your inexperienced team is perfect for building a teaching site for programming.

prasanmishra 15 years ago | |

Thanks very much Detrus for your feedback.

Regarding the lengthy code, I will definitely add on my feature list. And will try to come up with some feature how I can show the related code snippets and also try to maintain the learning is simple philosophy so it should not be too heavy to understand. The label and highlighted of the code is definitely a very good suggestion.

Initially I thought of introducing voting at first like HN and Reditt. But as in the initial stage difficult to get the traction of site, it all vote will look zero. So chosen views instead which gives me little motivation :) but one downside I seen using the views, it get updated by each bot. So I updated program not to update view count by the different bots. But definitely I am thinking a lot how to come up with better rating or voting system to make the content little bit structured as well so that a new user can read in one sequence. Also review of description I too thought about this and trying out some mock. But now I am trying to get some beta user or some community around it. Based on their feedback, I will try to implement some review system for the description.

Translation I didn't thought yet. But really if someone write in our native language we will be more happy. So many people may also like that translation feature.

Sure I will brainstorm with my team how we can link different short snippets and try to solve a common tasks.

Thanks a lot for your kind word!!!

nimrody 15 years ago |

I must be missing something basic here.

Where is the search box?

Otherwise -- very nice! (Although somewhat close to StackOverflow in typical use)

prasanmishra 15 years ago | |

Thanks very much for your feedback. I am planning to add the search box :)

exline 15 years ago |

The site looks very nice. Clean and well presented.

Search is a must for a site like this. I know you said it is coming soon, which is good. One other issue is that you are using a fixed width layout. For code examples, sometimes you will need a larger area to display the code without wrapping. If you had a fluid layout that let the main portion grow, that would solve the problem.

You may want to add a wish list area where people could request examples they would like to see. I also like Detrus idea of chaining items together to form a larger tutorial.

prasanmishra 15 years ago | |

Thanks very much exline for your suggestion. I will definitely work on search and launch it soon.

Yeah I too found the problem surrounding the wrapping of code hopefully we will look into more deeper the fluid layout to make the code more presentable.

Oh this is really a cool idea!! Definitely try to implement this functionality thanks again for your response!

sandipagr 15 years ago |

Clickable: http://www.codesnipr.com

prasanmishra 15 years ago | |

Thanks sandipagr.. for the link.. because of your link I can able to see around 30 people came to the site using HN other wise difficult to know the referer. Thanks :)