Breck’s Homepage

Just returned from an amazing road trip down to Florida. Now time to get cracking on JustHackIt.

Crazy day for JustHackIt. First a quick numbers update. Over 14,000 visitors, over 400 new users, and over 30,000 page views. Not bad for less than 48 hours.

The big issue now is how to keep the community growing and increase the number of connections formed through the site. This is going to be slightly more work than I anticipated.

Couldn’t come at a more hectic time. In addition to finishing up a freelance project, helping one sister move to Lebanon and getting ready to head to Florida to help the other sister, dealt with a ton of emails from users, potential acquirers and potential co-founders.

I think trying to sell the site is not the way to go after exploring that option a bit. The money wouldn’t be much at all(got a number of bids but all sub $1000), the real reason to do it would be to put the site into someone’s hands who would hopefully keep the momentum going. But then I thought, even if the next couple of days I’m not available to work on it much, in the long run having control of it will insure that it succeeds in its goal of connecting many new co-founders.

So now it looks like we’re putting together a solid team of hackers to grow and improve the site. Already met some smart people and couldn’t be more excited about it.

JustHackIt.com continues to grow. In less than 24 hours the site has gotten nearly 10,000 unique visitors, and hundreds of users. Next steps:

• Improve the CSS
• Create a common template for posting ideas or bios
• Add tagging/categorization
• Start the first JustHackIt Hackathon contest
• Start an IRC channel

This may require moving the site off SlinkSet(in order to add tagging and some other features). We’ll see. Currently I’m talking to a few people who may be able to take this site farther than I could alone.

JustHackIt blew away all my expectations. Since 11pm last night, the site has gotten over 5,600 unique visitors and 150 new members. A lot of this is due to the TechCrunch article, but visitors are also streaming in from HackerNews, Reddit, and a bunch of other sources.

Already there appears to be a number of people who have connected via this service.

Now the trick will be to make some slight improvements to hopefully encourage more cooperative projects.

Thanks to everyone who has provided feedback and signed up! I’ll keep the updates going with more stats and improvement notices.

This evening JustHackIt.com launched. Before you co-found a company, you need to find good co-founders. The best way to do that is to just work on projects with people. The idea for JustHackIt is to connect hackers in one place and encourage them to just start projects together, without even knowing the person. Hopefully you’ll find some people who are smart, talented, and will make a great co-founder in the future.

The idea stemmed from the YC meetup last week. PG said that the YC interviews aren’t like interviews at all, they just “Do YC”. If the team and YC seem to click, then they get accepted. I think the same thing applies for finding good cofounders–you just start something and see if the chemistry among the team clicks. I’ve started projects with friends and complete strangers before, and whether or not I knew them before the project isn’t correlated with how well we worked together. There are a few people I met the day of starting a joint project who I’d love to start another company with.

That’s what I hope this site could do: not just bring hackers together to discuss startups, but bring them together to launch things and find new cofounders.

Already, the site’s getting pretty good traffic–400 visitors in the last hour. I don’t know if it will go anywhere, but it took only a few minutes to put together(thanks to slinkset) and hopefully will connect at least 1 co-founder team.

BTW, the signup rate is pretty good–users are already in the double digits!

First one is on the Blackberry. Every now and then my entire call log and SMS inbox will be erased. Completely. Even missed calls and unread SMS messages. This has happened so many times that I finally looked it up. Here’s what I found, from Blackberry’s website:

When the BlackBerry smartphone becomes critically low on memory, SMS messages and call logs will automatically be deleted in order to keep a minimum amount of free space available.  This functionality is by design.

I can’t believe they would design this. I mean, could you please inform me first, at the very least? I’ve had times when people send me SMS and call me and I don’t have my phone on me. When I do pickup the phone, if things have been deleted, I’ll have no idea. Extremely annoying. Why can’t they just close some open programs or delete the sample background pictures first? Why you ever would delete unread incoming messages baffles me. Having access to my phone call logs and sms inbox is one of the most important features of my phone.

The second thing is Windows Update’s Automatic Restarts. Windows Update downloads and installs updates in the background. Occasionally it needs to restart. A window will pop up and alert you that your computer is about to be automatically restarted. You can click “Restart Now”, or “Restart Later”. If you click the latter, in 5 minutes the window will pop up again. If you don’t click anything, your computer will be restarted in 5 minutes. The end result is: if you leave your computer for 10 minutes, it will be restarted and there is nothing you can do about it except stay close. Why couldn’t they add a “Restart in X hours” button or a “Don’t restart ever” button? Once again, this leads to data loss when some applications are shut down in the middle of something.

According to this brief study done in 2006, not very:

Based on the evidence we’ve gathered here, it’s safe to say that no external metric, traffic prediction service or ranking system available on the web today provides any accuracy when compared with real numbers.

I wonder if things have changed two years later?