Has anyone been able to make this within a company? Where I work everyone gets 20% time and many of us do take it. Yet most of the projects worked on tend to be lone wolf pursuits with very little collaboration. It's not as if the things people work on wouldn't be of interest to others either.
I think 20% time is naturally opposed to collaboration.
In my head, "20% time" is actually "work on what I want to work on", and I spend all week working on things someone else tells me to do. If I take some "me time", it's not going to be used for someone else. And if I'm going to do something for someone else, I'm going to just get my regular projects done.
There's a small possibility that someone else has a great idea that I really want to help with, but that idea would have to be big enough that 2 people could work on it at the same time, too.
So in the end, I think 20% Collab is a bit of an oxymoron.
As a tech lead I try to check in with everyone's 20% time at least every other month. Junior and even mid-level developers, who are usually doing projects to learn a new language/framework/etc. often need help structuring their approach or just someone to rubber-duck with. But for people who are trying out projects that might eventually be merged into our prod code, it looks more like pair programming or PR-based collaboration.
> It's not as if the things people work on wouldn't be of interest to others either.
People on the team feel different pain points differently, and don't see the full picture for things they don't feel pain on until they see the solution. Alice has no problem writing a lot of similarly-shaped code and doesn't see the point of Bob's refinements to the code generator. Bob isn't on the on-call team and doesn't care about Alice's unified metrics collector that simplifies 20 different alerts.
If any teams building on this want a free Coherence account to help get them started, please get in touch at withcoherence.com. Consistent environments from dev to prod across the project should be helpful on a dynamic team!
I perceive the landing page as shady, there is absolutely no context about who drive this initiative. Does the .com imply it's commercial?
As a public servant in my country I'm heavily restricted in how I can work on side project (FOSS, educational and art are Ok, any other commercial gig is a no go).
It tell so little before asking personal info, it's a clearly a no go for me because of that, which is a shame because the concept might be interesting.
This was primarily built with “hackers” (in terms of building quick and for fun) in mind. Also, your side project can be open-source or commercial, that’s entirely up to you.
The platform is just a place to collaborate and find other developers for it and just- build it. Sort of like a hacker house.
I run this with two friends of mine. We’re a bunch of indie devs working together. It’s a team of 3 part-time devs. And, no, I won’t resell your data. If this doesn’t work out, I’ll purge the database.
It’s completely free to use, currently. Once we work with more feedback, we are going to add a premium subscription before phasing out the free plans.
I have a few ideas that I've been wondering how to find people with the right skillsets to help me out with it, and thus this is interesting, however weekly 1:1's sound... exhausting. I could do it for a little while and maybe find the right folks, but is there a way to then limit or stop them? Or is this focused towards extroverts?
It’s just once a week for those who want it and with enough users, there are always developers at some point who are interested in meeting someone new for the week.
The projects, however, are always open to start or work on (existing ones).
The idea of this stresses me out. It's highlighting my own deficiency in collaboration when it comes to working on hobby projects. I like the _idea_ of working on fun things with like-minded individuals, but heck, I do that all the time at work. 5 days a week I build things together with people, collaborate, compromise, review, etc. For projects outside of work, I find it difficult to give up control and end up working on my own. I could imagine working with a designer/UX person and giving them the lead on visual and interaction flows, but the overall _idea_ and _implementation_ must be my own.
I suppose this landing page made me realize that I'm a control freak.
Hey, we’ve thought about the ability to add terms but emphasis needs to be placed on the fact, that as of now, this is still an experiment our small team of 3 (part-time devs) is running and providing mediation from our end would be tiresome and not the best use of time.
So, we’ll be implementing the ability to add terms for every project now by the creator/founder of that project. Just like how it works in real-life.
Yeah it’s something that has burned me out after 15 years of development. Work then go hang out with some people from work and they just talk about work or side projects. When you are younger I kinda of understood and was also one of the people doing it but now that I’m older im amazed at how many people never find anything outside of work.
Im strictly 9-5 and done now and don’t do any work events if I can avoid it. I was thinking about joining a decent sized startup recently 150+ and when I was meeting some of the team one of the first things I was asked was “so what side projects are you working on right now”. I was already a little worried about startup culture but after that was said I just told them I wasn’t interested after.
I think it's a given that some unknown percent of people wouldn't find this useful, but not very useful for everyone to bring up separately unless you mean you think this service has no use in general
The idea is good but the UI of the sign up page has so many bugs, when click on a field the screen extremely zoom in without reason, is imposible to fill the form.
Browsers on iPhones (and any device in iOS) are not using chrome's engine but (are required to) rely on Apples WebKit instead. Problems ocurring in Android/ Windows/ ... Chrome versions might not be reproducible in those devices.
