Show HN: DevClad – A social-workspace platform for developers
github.comDevClad[https://devclad.com] is a social-workspace platform for developers to team up on projects and hackathons seamlessly.
It functions by matching you 1-on-1 with a compatible developer every week :) OP: this is not a direct criticism of your idea or implementation (in fact, by the end, you might notice I'm not sure I even have a valid criticism here), just a general observation on a trend I feel is common on this sort of initiative. I don't know about y'all, but I hate this idea of random 1-on-1s. Nothing sends my anxiety levels to the freaking roof as the idea of having to talk alone to a complete stranger. Make it 3+ people, though, and I'm absolutely game for it. This is not about being reclusive/introverted/autistic/antisocial/whatever: I actually like socializing, and meeting new people (well, to a certain extent, but I digress). It's just that, at least for me, 1-on-1 interactions are the most intense ones, even with people you know, let alone with strangers. Group interactions put much less pressure in each person, and it increases the chances of having at least one more extroverted person to lead the conversation. And yet, almost every single instance of this trope of "helping people connect through random pairings" is 1-on-1. Maybe I'm the exception here, or maybe it's easier to implement 1-on-1 pairings, I don't know. But I'd love to see more things like this, but that didn't promote one of my worst nightmares as a feature. Just to add myself to the contrasting voices: I used to be like you but nowadays I enjoy the idea of 1-on-1s with strangers. Perhaps what changed for me was accumulating knowledge and experience over the years by simply being very curious about all sorts of things. Thus I found that I don't even have to try anymore, my natural curiosity + experience automatically leads me through such encounters all the while being fully aware of the risk of being confronted with an absolute nutcase which only makes things a little more exciting. To bring a contrasting perspective, I see nothing weird about meeting people one-to-one, and I see it as the most natural and efficient process for discovering opportunities. I meet with potential co-founders on StartupSchool and customers for my consulting business one-on-one all the time. You shoot the shit for 10min, see if there is common ground, and take it from there. Nothing prevents you from connecting with a third person or more later! I'm interested in DevClad as it is and have added it to my to-do list to try in the coming weeks. I'm much more comfortable with a one to one meetings, just to give another anecdata point Same for me. In group situations I always have the pressure to talk so I am not overtalked by other people. This obviously depends on the group, but that's gow I usually feel.
I also have a quite high "response latency" and people just tend to answer and share the stories quicker and more eagerly, so I feel often left out in those situations. funny enough, i used to have MASSIVE anxiety spikes when i thought about talking to a random stranger 1-on-1, to the point where i would basically lock up. two things helped: i started taking CBD oil (with a medical prescription) and, more importantly, i started interviewing people at my last job, which meant i had to talk to strangers at least once a week. nowadays i still have some anxiety, but after making my self go through 1-on-1 interviews i got used to it, and now i actually enjoy it :) Nothing sends my anxiety levels to the freaking roof as the idea of having to talk alone to a complete stranger. Gaining experiences through the platform might be a useful tool for mitigating that anxiety. But if you have a therapist, maybe talk to them first. Or not. Or you don't. My point being that learning as an adult means breaking habits, jumping into situations that you habitually avoid, and generally doing things that you are either bad at or put you at discomfort. > This is not about being reclusive/introverted/autistic/antisocial/whatever Sounds like it might be about being extraverted. It of course depends on the specific scenario, but introverts tend to be more comfortable 1 on 1 or in small groups, whereas extraverts tend to prefer small groups or large groups. Honestly? I'm not an extrovert at all but a group of 3+ people makes it a lot easier to keep my distance and get a feel for how people are before engaging with them. For me this is very much an autism thing. When going to conferences I've made it a habit to try to talk to new people on every break out of principle (because after all, if I just want to watch the talks, usually there are recordings available afterwards or even a livestream, so they're a waste of money on their own). But approaching strangers standing alone is extremely awkward unless you have a plausible excuse (e.g. queuing) so the "open circle" group of 3+ people (i.e. keeping enough space while facing each other so at least another person can easily join) tends to work best. Being in a group of 3+ people also reduces the social anxiety of whether it's okay to back out because you're not abandoning the person specifically, while also making it easier for an additional person to join because there's already a conversation going so it's fine if you find that you have nothing to add. Tbh, it sounds like it might be about not wanting to connect that bad. Because if you want to connect really bad (for romance, business, friendship, or what have you), you learn very quickly that one-to-one connections are not something you dispense with. There's an important distinction here between the concepts of "wanting to" and "knowing how to" and how they impact someone's decision to attempt something. For example, your car may break down and you may ultimately decide to have it towed to a garage and repaired by a mechanic even though you may very badly "want to" repair it yourself. You make that decision because you understand that you do not "know how to" fix it yourself. The outcome of that scenario can be very different based on the degree to which you want to or know how to approach it. Similarly, someone who decides to avoid a one on one interaction with someone may very badly want to make a connection with someone else but they decide not to because they don't know how to appropriately handle such a situation. This may not be entirely anxiety driven since many people will have repeatedly attempted one on one connections and failed badly, leading them to believe perhaps rightly that they don't know how to and so they must lean on some other device such as socializing only in group settings where they can build off of others' social skills. I'm not saying it's impossible for anyone to learn how to successfully connect one on one with others, I'm just asking that you not assume that everyone has the same learned skills and knowledge that you do. I am getting lost in all these semantic considerations. How can you build a business or form a romantic relationship or a friendship without one-to-one connections? I think the TLDR is that you might WANT to build a business, form romantic relationship or friendships, but not have the skills to do so or else be uncomfortable with the process of getting to that point (despite wanting the end result). one way this 1-on-1 evolved in the past was shared culture, aspirations, commitments.. you like the same music, you know you agree on some things, you are on the same (tribal+ sized) team. 1-on-1 can be a lot of stress - empathy on that computers attract .. what is the term "neuro-atypical" or something? one of the few times I really lost my patience was with an Ausberger-kind-of-guy.. I thought I was patient, I tried to be patient.. maybe there are some learned skills.. limiting the scope of what the interaction involves, also can be constructive Group chats also reduce the likelihood for abuse, which is why all prevention nowadays requires more than two people present in abuse-prone situations like locker rooms etc. I personally don’t do well on group chats, I am also an introvert but I feel that I am able to better connect with people on a 1-to-1 capacity. > Every week, you are matched with another dev using an ML algorithm for a 1 on 1 call. I must admit I rolled my eyes when I read "ML algorithm" since it's usually marketing bullshit. Seemingly it's unsupervised knn w/ Scikit Learn, mixing variables like "open to video calls", "location", "openness to ideas" and "timezone". Fairly neat. What if it used an AI to match you instead? We can even run that AI on blockchain! I literally can't even, trigger warning! I hope you are using that blockchain on an ethically sourced quantum computer using ethically raised qubits. It indeed is. I'll try to find someone better at ML than me over time but I think this approach should serve well at least for the first 1k users or so if I'm not wrong. maybe just say “similarity” rather than “ml algorithm” since that is what you are doing From the POV of a marketing copy, I don't think that sticks. I could possibly change it on the Github, however. Or, elaborate on what is meant by an ML algorithm in the context of DevClad. > you are matched with another dev using an ML algorithm Could be simplified to just: > you are automatically matched with another dev Fair point. Isn't "unsupervised knn w/ Scikit Learn" ML? Yes it's unsupervised and not a lot of effort was put into it, but it is still ML. The usage of "usually" in the comment you are replying to is often paired with a "but/except" that I feel is implied here, and so they actually agree with you. Is this like Lunchclub? https://lunchclub.com/ Similar. I took that as a starting point for the developer niche and I plan on turning it into something where developers can work on ideas together. I built an even more rough version of that here - https://connectdome.com (but then I realized I was dealing with feature-bloat) so now I'm experimenting a little slower. *> connectdome.com OT, but that's an expertsexchange kind of domain... is connectdome still up and running or is it a dead project at this point? might wanna try it and compare to this one I'll just be honest. One on ones suck. We all mostly have to do it year after year with managers and it's a huge uncomfortable waste of time. Having to talk to some random person is even more awkward and a waste of time. Make it useful and group up 3-4 randos at a time. The best conversations happen in small groups. The problem there isn't the tool ("one on one") but the surrounding process in your organization from what it sounds like. In my experience, having a weekly 1:1 with your manager works really well. If that's a frequent and regular occurrence, there's nothing uncomfortable about it. It's a weekly block of time where you can discuss the priorities, give feedback, talk about things outside of work or start salary negotiations or role changes. If there's a week where there's nothing new it'll just be 5 minutes long, but having a regular no-pressure event is a lot less stressful than having a scheduled 1:1 come out of nowhere or once or twice a year. You completely missed my point. I'm not talking about managers, I'm talking about how fucking awkward it is to talk to people. We're mostly all a bunch of nerds. Lots of common ground, below average social skills. (I'm intentionally being facetious here.) Small groups of 3-4 people with similar interests are WAY easier to feel comfortable in and get interesting conversations going. Even for "nerds" there are usually people where they don't feel awkward about talking to them (Friends, family, online regulars,...). My point is that by not making a 1:1 a big event but rather a regular occurrence it'll be just become part of a regular week, and not a big event or something to feel awkward about. This is very different to meeting an online stranger you have never interacted with every week. > This is very different to meeting an online stranger you have never interacted with every week. Isn't that what's happening in this app? From the landing page: > Every week, you are matched with another dev automatically for a 1 on 1 call. So it's going to super awkward for people that don't like cold starts with strangers. I agree with the other commenter but I've also seen responses in other comments that say some people prefer 1-on-1s to groups so I say, why not both? Just have a preference that says if you want to do 1-on-1 or a small group and let people choose. That way if you change your mind or want to try out the other type you can switch. We all know how this goes from dating websites... just a bunch of non-technical co-founders looking for easy matches or pretending to be developers to keep tabs on their former engineers. Bet there are tons of fake developer accounts too. We are not pieces of meat! Inflammatory comment imo (or perhaps meant to be humorous). Either way, every developer you interact on DevClad with is approved manually. The factors used to manually approve a profile include a history of building side-projects or employment as an SDE at a company. This is the reason there's a 2-step onboarding process before you get to use DevClad. It can be a good prescreening recruitment platform where developers try to find other developers to join their team. With this kind of platform, you need to keep the quality and commitment high all the time, which is quite challenging. For example, I tried LunchClub for a few weeks, it was brilliant initially, but then you get those who canceled last minute or did not show up to the call and then stopped because I saw it as a waste of time. This is so on point. I've thought about this a lot and it's definitely something I will aggressively pursue if I manage to have good engagement initially. The preliminary step before pursuing this would be allowing users to work on projects and hackathons (or at least, showcase projects better) on DevClad. > you are matched with another dev using an ML algorithm for a 1 on 1 call I was wondering why so complicated and how the model was learned... > https://github.com/DevClad-Inc/devclad/blob/main/apps/server... Aha, better indeed to rely on your own human learning ;-) Seems nice! I would prefer a twist of this more towards finding other's with an expertise you don't have yourself and having the option to center the conversation around a particular topic, and some expectation of sharing advice and expertise (not just chatting). There could be a paid model, or you could imagine a credit system where you also offer your own expertise and time to others in equal measure. That could still lead to finding things to work together on, but could also lead to learning, consulting gigs or just networking - with the added benefit of being immediately useful at work. But that maybe already exists somewhere? When I try logging in with GitHub: Two things. 1. The page mentions: Thanks. I was imagining it'd use information from your GitHub account to match you better. As a suggestion you could also try and give users some levers on your matching algo. For example some people might be interested in matching up with someone similar. Some (like me) would like to talk to people doing different things, on different stacks, with different problem domains and find synergies/learning opportunities that way. I was wondering how you pair devs with similar interests and noticed that it says "using ML" exactly once. Is that the scope of it or are there settings? Seems I misunderstood completely. The site uses ML to do the matching and devs feed the ML how? Just tried it and even though I hit save on step 2, nothing happened and it deleted everything when I went back to step 1… Hope you can figure it out. I'll try replicating it. Update: It's a possibility you didn't hit Save on Step 1. I also had a problem. Figured it out by submitting with dev console open and reading HTTP response. There were no messages for errors: required fields, pronouns had a min lenght and stuff like that. Really like the idea and willing to try it out. Hope it works well. Good luck. The fact that submitting the forms keep them on screen and enabled is confusing, especially given you can submit using return. I've no interest in doing video 1-on-1s but would be interested in a text-based conversation. Services for developers? Good luck! The version of this which pairs developers with marketers is way more needed somewhat related to this
https://adplist.org
Seems odd? This application will be able to read and write all user data. This includes the following:
Private email addresses
Private profile information
Followers
2. It's completely optional to connect it. The reason it asks for all those permissions is because I'm planning to use it to integrate common Github actions in DevClad. Again, you don't need to do any of that. Optional. Github is only for login. To create an account, go to Signup.