HN Explorer

Ask HN: Does anybody need any help?

38 points by jaytera ↗ HN
Hey all,

So today I got 'furloughed'. In the UK, where I'm based, it means that although I'm still an employee of my company, the government pays 80% of my salary and I'm not allowed to do any work.

Paired with the fact I'm starting grad school in Boston in a few months, I would love to help anybody out on their projects/businesses wherever I can and where ever I can be of use. For free - I don't expect or want any pay.

So my question to you all is, do you need any help?

Before today I was working day to day as a designer in architecture and construction and was just about to start working on a project for Google in London (the contract didn't go through because of the pandemic situation).

So my main skills are in design. Drawing, Adobe, 3D Modelling, 3D printing, design thinking, prototyping, design sprints. All that good stuff.

However over the past year I have also began designing and building my own programs, so am very comfortable with sketch, invision, figma and the processes of wireframing etc. I can also code in the classic web dev languages from HTML to PHP and although I wouldn't say I'm comfortable yet I can hack together bits and pieces in React Native and Rails.

So whatever it may be, let me know!

Cheers, James

more at: jamesstirrat.com

14 comments

[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 42.2 ms ] thread
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
talmr
Hey James. I'll bite - if you have some spare time, could you come up with some nice graphics/svg for a local cuisine/restaurant recommendations app? All the best, friend.
jaytera
Sure. Drop me an email at jamesstirrat.com and let's talk.
madacoo
Hello James,

Please could you take a look at an amateur logo and offer some advice and/or maybe even fix it up a bit?

jaytera
This would be a pleasure - send it my way (with a brief explanation of the project)!
tobyhinloopen
I might need some help with Blender, rendering minecraft worlds. I can’t get the lighting and textures right.

It’s for a side project, creating isometric renders of builds to create minecraft tutorial videos

jaytera
Hey! Haven't used blender per se but is very similar to what I have used, and it's free. Shoot me an email at me@jamesstirrat.com and let's get started.
popped
Open source projects!

Find the highest profile one you can with horrendous design, that you have an interest in, and dive in.

This does good for everyone plus you get a highly visible record of contributing to OSS. Win win win.

Good luck

jaytera
Great idea. In the best spirit, any horrendously designed OS projects that you have in mind?
theSage
I built our local python community's website and to be honest I have no idea about what all is to be considered while designing a page.

The only thing I kept in mind was that almost all our members were using really bad 2g connections and so the site had to be super lightweight.

Anything you can help with/tell us to improve would go a long way.

https://www.pyjaipur.org/ https://github.com/PyJaipur/PyJaipur/tree/master/website

erklik
> Anything you can help with/tell us to improve would go a long way.

My suggestion would be to make it mobile friendly if they were using 2G.

Also, take a look at Brutalist Web Design for lightweight inspiration.

zzo38computer
It is OK if you want to try to help me with any of my software projects, which are hosted as Fossil repositories (you can access it with Fossil or using the web interface), whether by logos, feature requests, documentation, bug reports, etc. I have set up a NNTP server for discussion of them, too.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)