I've been impressed with Dark -- it has the potential to make it possible to build a scalable cloud application in an afternoon and reduce application complexity. This has a number of impacts long-term, from both making existing teams more productive, to bringing less sophisticated developers to participate in application development. I highly recommend you check it out.
[Disclosure - I'm an investor in the company, but my thoughts are my own.]
This is a 2015 New Year's Resolution, so the matchmaking doesn't kick-in until 2015. The purpose of the form is to accumulate a list of mentors and mentees who are committing to this pledge.
Thanks for bringing this up. My name is Ed Roman, and I'm the CEO of hack.hands(). I'm sorry if our expert onboarding approach was offensive in any way to you. As a young startup, we're still learning as we go and adjusting our approaches.
In case it's valuable to you, I'd like to offer you a free pass to a virtual conference we're holding, at hacksummit.org. This event has some of the best programmers in the world educating you, while raising money for coding charities. You can use the code ZACH to get through registration without any hassle.
I'm happy to chat further over email about any concerns you may have at ed@hackhands.com.
While it was semi-promotional, they offered him it as a sort of compensation. Should a company not be allowed to give out their products for free for compensation?
> While it was semi-promotional, they offered him it as a sort of compensation. Should a company not be allowed to give out their products for free for compensation?
Of course they should be able to do so, but chasing someone down who has (publicly, implicitly) expressed a desire no longer to be contacted, and for whatever reason making the contact in a forum in which it does not belong ("sorry if it was unwelcome" arguably belongs here; "how can we make it up to you?" belongs, if at all, in private communication), it seems to me is an unsavoury tactic.
The event doesn't really need more promotion -- it's already the largest developer conference in history. We're trying to raise money for a dozen non-profits in the coding space, and all money goes to them, not us -- so I'm not going to lose too much sleep if the event gets some more exposure incidentally from my reply to offer someone a free ticket.
If you read my bio, I think you'll see that I understand the demographic quite well -- http://about.me/Edro
Just so that this doesn't get buried in the comments, here's a repost: We have a special code for HN users to get a free ticket and bypass the registration process. We want to seed the audience with great developers who can help spread the word. Just put this code in: HACKERNEWS at http://hacksummit.org
I think that's a great idea. We really wanted to accept bitcoin but ran out of engineering bandwidth. We were looking at dogecoin too. I hope developers who are unable to pay in cash will still join us through sharing on social media (or if you're a hackernews member, using the free promotion code mentioned elsewhere in these comments).
Thanks for the feedback Martin. We're continuing to onboard additional speakers to further diversify our roster. The non-profits are helping us in this reach-out via introductions.
Thanks Peter. We are working closely with the founder of Crowdcast. He's an incredible programmer and we're lucky to have him helping us. He benefits tangentially from this exposure.
