Grace and humility are sadly lacking here (though I don't find these to be common traits in executive types). I understand you built this thing and your identity is wrapped up in it, but at some point you have to respect that the mission has become bigger than you.
"Allegations from the board — reinforced by multiple interviews that TechCrunch conducted with former BGC employees — included Bryant misgendering a staff member and creating a toxic work environment. Bryant has denied these allegations."
Even if the allegations turn out to be false, is your paycheck and status so important that you're willing to risk all the momentum you've built in helping black girls get into tech? Jeopardizing a generational movement like this is so shortsighted it hurts. It feels like the Judgement of Solomon [1] except the real mother would rather the baby die than have it live on without her.
If you're reading this Kimberly, the right thing at this point is to let go. Relinquish the domain and other BGC assets. Let them live. The black girls your org was helping shouldn't be punished because of a spat between you and the board. All that legal shit can play out behind the scenes. From the outside looking in, your current actions are doing more harm than good and it's a bad look for you. You'll always be the spark of Black Girls Code and no one can steal that from you, but don't be the fire that burns it down.
Just relaunched after going dark for a couple months trying to figure out a way to make it work. As a solo dev project I was chewing off more than I could chew with trying to handle disputes between users when direct payments were involved so I replaced it with tipping.
Hoping after a bit of usage I can gather enough info to find out the value of another dev's perspective when you get stuck on some code and the unconsidered solutions they can offer.
I built this app and want to say first and foremost, thanks for checking it out! I also want to address a few common things I've seen mentioned.
> 75¢ a minute is not enough
I personally don't think it's too low for a job where there's no interview and the only requirement is > 100 rep on S/O. With a critical mass of question flow, answering questions on Call a Dev would beat working at your local gas station making $11.50 an hour.
The job market is ultra competitive for junior-intermediate devs. And there's not a lot of opportunities for them to make money b/w grinding leetcode, sending out resumes, and competing for contracts on upwork in a race to the bottom.
I made Call a Dev as a place to find a companion to help you while you are struggling with something. They may not know the exact answer to your question, but sometimes two heads are better than one and getting a little perspective from someone else is all you really need.
> 100 S/O rep is too high/low
For todays questions about whether aliens exist, where do babies come from, and why do my balls have sperm in them, it's admittedly too high. But until I get some real data points of people requesting refunds (which you can opt to do just by clicking a button after a call ends) it's seems okay.
> Letting people post anonymously/not having a report button
The first app I ever built on my own was all thanks to Michael Hartl and his rails tutorial from 7 years ago. As soon as I deployed that app I was eager to show him what his free tutorial had enabled me to build so I emailed him and he said, to paraphrase, "Cool. I can't really see it though because it wants me to sign up to use it."
Ever since then, I've been relentless about removing friction. That trade off means that a few troll posts are bound to get through and I'm ok with that. This app is still in the interesting project phase so adding a report button is a nice to have that I can add down the line, but after working on this for 3 months I had to get it out the door.
Appreciate all the feedback.
For anyone curious about the stack its an elixir/phoenix/liveview app.
Thanks for the question! Your concern is justified. There are no guarantees. The only thing for certain is that if you don't get a ping within 60 minutes then your question will be deleted.
It's kind of a chicken/egg problem where there aren't enough questions because I don't have enough people to answer them, and there aren't enough enough people to answer them without a steady supply of questions to keep them busy.
I'm reconsidering the pay rate after reading a few of the comments here.
Thanks for checking it out! I could never guarantee that tho as Call a Dev is mostly self-service from the standpoint of the question asker and the question answerer. I wanted to reduced friction as much as possible for both sides of the equation.
If you're willing to pay more money for more guarantee you should check out codementor.io
Ideally you'd post a question and get a ping within the first few minutes. But there is a 1 hour max window for any question to receive a ping. Once the ping comes through, if you decide to accept it, then the dev has 60 seconds to answer the call.
As it stands, there isn't much supply of questions or devs to answer them (just launched today with no early signups). I was thinking one way to get around this would be to let devs subscribe to email or text notifications when a questions is posted with a specific tag.
Devs ping any problems they feel capable of solving. They can ping with 2 messages, either they KNOW they can help, or they THINK they can help.
Once you receive a ping you can vet their S/O profile and if you like what you see you can start the call.
It's not so much for contract work or to complete tasks or projects like fiverr is. It's about getting personalized help with code your struggling with.
I liked what another commenter said about adding tiers for devs with higher S/O rep. So if the dev has a higher rep, they can make more $ per minute. Something I'll look into adding.
I don't think anyone is going to make much money off of it starting out since I don't have a large supply of questions coming in yet, but there are a lot of underemployed devs out there who would be happy to make an easy $15 bucks an hour just googling answers for people and telling them what to do.
I think a lot of poorly-received questions on S/O are the result of people not knowing where to look for their answer, or being intimidated by reading the docs or source code. So they post the questions hoping someone can guide them.
Call a Dev isn't a competitor to S/O. S/O is a wiki. Call a Dev is basically Clippy in human form that you pay per minute.
Yea things are always a lot faster when you have someone who can tell you exactly what you don't know.
The main difference with Call a Dev is the lack of friction for the devs who need help, and the devs who need work. You just post your question and if someone can help, you'll get a ping with a link to their S/O profile. If you like what you see, you accept the ping and the call starts.
A video is a good idea, I'm putting one together now.
"The comic shows a young boy floating in a barrel in an ocean that doesn't have a visible end. It comments on the unlikely optimism and perhaps naïveté people sometimes display. The boy is completely lost and seems hopelessly alone, without any plan or control of the situation. Yet, rather than afraid or worried, he is instead quietly curious: "I wonder where I'll float next?" Although not necessarily the situation in this comic, this is a behavior people often exhibit when there is nothing they can do about a problematic situation for a long time; they may have given up hope or developed a cavalier attitude as a coping mechanism."
Interesting essay Jay. The top comment in this thread is by throwaway13337. You see this when people have a hot take they want to post but aren't ready to own it in front of their peers. I'd bet on average comments from accounts with identifiable personal info are much more tame and civil. But if everyone is too scared to talk about something for fear of getting cancelled then anonymity is the natural answer.
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Maybe in the future if something is written by a bot it will need to be disclosed that a real human did not %100 write it. I mean I just looked at your blog and your twitter and I feel like a devious enough actor could use AI to help them create just as genuine of an online presence as you have, even down to the profile pic.
I actually wanted to raise this discussion on HN and created a thread [1] but it didn't get any traction. Maybe it could be a future topic for you.
If things continue the way they are we'll all be paranoid about everything being fake, like an internet Truman show. The sad part is you know it's fake and there's nothing you can do about it. So basically we have to go back to meatspace for genuine human interaction which is not the absolute worst I guess as long as there's not a deadly pandemic going on.
> Surprisingly, launching a mediocre product as soon as possible, and then talking to customers and iterating, is much better than waiting to build the “perfect” product.
This reminds me of a Steven Pressfield quote, "Better to have written a lousy ballet than to have composed no ballet at all."
Some things are a numbers game and require showing up consistently to build quality through quantity.
Just watching the game's trailer[1] gives you a feel for how generic the game was. Given that it's coming from Amazon though, maybe that's not surprising.
Excited to give this a try and see if it will help me expand my day-to-day git-fu.
I like interactive learning resources like this. A similar one was posted to hn a while back for postgres and going through it taught me a lot. https://pgexercises.com/
"Allegations from the board — reinforced by multiple interviews that TechCrunch conducted with former BGC employees — included Bryant misgendering a staff member and creating a toxic work environment. Bryant has denied these allegations."
Even if the allegations turn out to be false, is your paycheck and status so important that you're willing to risk all the momentum you've built in helping black girls get into tech? Jeopardizing a generational movement like this is so shortsighted it hurts. It feels like the Judgement of Solomon [1] except the real mother would rather the baby die than have it live on without her.
If you're reading this Kimberly, the right thing at this point is to let go. Relinquish the domain and other BGC assets. Let them live. The black girls your org was helping shouldn't be punished because of a spat between you and the board. All that legal shit can play out behind the scenes. From the outside looking in, your current actions are doing more harm than good and it's a bad look for you. You'll always be the spark of Black Girls Code and no one can steal that from you, but don't be the fire that burns it down.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgement_of_Solomon