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Ask HN: Want to help build PairRoulette, ChatRoulette for pair programming?

11 points by cap10morgan ↗ HN
Tell the site what you know, and what you want to pair on. You earn cred for helping others, and this moves up in the queue to get help from people who know how to do what you're trying to do.<p>Who wants to help me build this?

14 comments

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Skywing
That could be interesting. What if, instead of faces on the cams, it was your desktops. :P

Also, what's to stop them from just showing their junk like on Chatroulette?

cap10morgan
I'm thinking both would be useful. And/or faces and a good online collaborative code editor.
cap10morgan
Haha, nothing to stop the junk except the "Next" button. Maybe some auto-rating based on time spent in a pairing session? Assumption being longer sessions mean useful work is getting done, but quick skips mean some doofus was showing his junk.
Skywing
I'm thinking something a little less random might serve this idea better. Perhaps more or less like a room, where you could see multiple people all at once. Could make public or private rooms. I'd also almost say don't even allow web cam, just strictly desktop streaming. But, I could also see how seeing faces could be helpful, too. Perhaps it could have Picture-in-Picture, and you could swap between your desktop or you face being big, and the other being small in the corner. Some tutorial videos do this - it has their desktop with their face in the bottom right.

I just don't think much would get done if you were just on there finding people that may or may not have anything in common.

cap10morgan
Yeah, it wouldn't be totally random. You'd profile yourself for what you know already, and for each project you ask for a pair on, what you want help with. Then you rate people on how well they helped you.

I think the face vs. desktop thing should be A/B tested. It could go either way.

Khao
Make them sign up to use the service instead of being 100% anonymous. That would fix the problem since you could ban people. This way you could also have extra features like chat logs and the like.
kingsidharth
"If Chatroulette used facebook connect, people would've kept their pants up" -Gary VaynerchukI guess that could solve it.
gabaix
I tend to think people enjoy Chatroulette because of anonymousness.
iwr
Prepare for obfuscated-code penises.
cap10morgan
s/and this moves up/and this moves you up/
andrewtbham
have you considered a way to pay people to help you code and get paid for helping others?

Are you asking for feature recommendations or a partner/employee type help?

cap10morgan
Yes, optional bounties / payments would be good to build in. I'm looking for partners to help build it. They would obviously have a lot of say over features at that point. :)
cap10morgan
I've written a very tiny amount of code around this, hosted here: https://github.com/cap10morgan/pairon

Right now it just uses the Github API to let you pair on a GH repo by putting /github/user/repo in the app's URL.

It's a Rails 3 app.