HN Explorer

HN Review: Become a mentor, find a mentor.

27 points by bryanh ↗ HN
Just finished a side project of mine: an app that matches you with a sort of "work-out buddy" where you each do weekly reviews of each others' progress on goals.

I tried to make the site extremely simple and easy to use, though there may be a few bugs in it, I'd like to invite the HN community to give it a spin and share their thoughts.

A quick disclaimer; any info you elect to enter is only semi-available to other users during the searching phase. After you confirm a match, only your match (or mentor) will see your info. You can delete your account or sever your match at anytime.

http://everymentor.com/ (as in, everyone mentors!)

19 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 52.1 ms ] thread
greenlblue
Pretty neat project. I just signed up and I noticed a little typo. When choosing experience level for matches it says "I would not mind helping someone with less _experienced_".
bryanh
Duly noted. Thank you.
MartinMond
This is awesome. There's only one thing missing. I have lots of experience with programming, but little in Marketing and Startups.

So while I absolutely want to mentor someone who's interested in programming, I'm not capable of mentoring someone in Marketing/Startups.

bryanh
Yes, I totally agree. The reasons why I left that out are numerous, but two are: (1) the extra time required to programming something like that (2) our concept of "mentoring" is more like a workout buddy and less about experience and skill (although I left those metrics in mainly for end-user filtering purposes).
jeffepp
Very cool, going to sign up now. This is the type of app that could benefit 99% of us here - bravo!
bryanh
Thanks! Reading HN inspired it 100%.
jeffepp
Even better than I imagined when I initially read your comments!

I have already: 1) signed up; 2) created a profile; and 3) requested a mentor.

Super-fast and very easy.

p206
Great idea, signed up right away. When setting up your account, selecting how much experience you have is a little confusing in my opinion: I have been a "professional" software developer for a few years, but still early in my career. Should I select "professional experience" or "little/some/average experience"?
bryanh
This was mainly an issue of semantics (suggestions on wording appreciated). Just imagine them in order of least-to-most.
p206
Well, I would remove the "professional experience" option. That's what confused me. Without it you still have 6 levels of granularity, that ought to be enough for anybody :)
whimsy
It would be nice to be able to filter people based on some sort of tag. For example, I'm interested in learning programming in Python, but not programming in Lisp right now.

For Design, I guess this might involve the tools they use? Photoshop, InDesign, etc. (This might be a gibberish example - I'm not a designer.)

It took me a little bit to figure out that I could see the bios of other people by hovering over their name. It might be beneficial to add a default tooltip to those without something entered... something like "This user has a blank bio." It would also be good to provide a hint that that hover information is there - I did not expect it and only found it by accident.

zmmz
Wow, this thing looks great.

Do you think you could make it so that for those not located in the states they would have the option of entering at least the city name? I'm in Europe and hence do not have a zip code.

If anybody would like to help me overcome my griefs about not knowing how to code while working in IT, I would appreciate a mentor. My username is the same here and one everymentor.

Finally, I don't seem to be able to receive the verification email.

puredemo
Server error as soon as I tried to register an account.
realitygrill
Same here
bryanh
Bah. We seem to be having trouble with Google Apps blocking emails based on a daily limit, apparently the upgrade hasn't gone through yet and is forcing an error on SMTP connections. Working on it.

Edit: fixed (sorta). We're just caching emails for now until Google gets their stuff together.

kksm19820117
Things I like:

1. Clean color scheme: The grayscale goes really easy on the eyes.

2. Match Score: While a simple ranking should have been enough, your quantification somehow gives me an idea of how far apart two matches might be. Good move - that is added intelligence.