It would be great if you could expand the areas of expertise though. For example, I have significant expertise with cloud computing, EC2 deployment, scaling, MongoDB, but there's nowhere to mention this. I also have expertise deploying Rails in production, the different possible setups, etc. Just checking off "Rails" is a bit broad.
I'd like the hardcoded areas of expertise removed in favor of an autocomplete freeform box, much like Stack Overflow's tags box. For example, I'd like to put that I'm a Drupal expert and I'd like to look for node.js help, but neither of those are options.
I'm not sure a tagging system is the best option though. It's very flexible indeed but it's at the expense of the simplicity of checkboxes. Especially when many tags mean the same thing. eg: rails and rubyonrails.
Since "hacker" expertise is a limited scope, perhaps expanding from there is a better idea?
The problem I see with this is it might not be all that limited. There are quite a few areas of expertise out there, which could make for quite a large form, where as defined "sections" with a free form tag style fill in would make for less clutter. Its "hackers" were talking about after all, most if not all are going to be familiar with a tag system.
As far as the duplicate tags there a number of ways to correct this. First and most prominent is community editing. The other option is to tie tags together with a backend system - for example ruby-on-rails === rubyonrails === rails === RoR
Maybe you could use the best of both approaches by presenting the most popular/important/broad tags (e.g. PHP, usability, CPC) as a suggested list while allowing users to add their own, more specific or less popular tags (e.g. drupal, memcached, adsense, appengine).
Or (as long as it's performant), an auto-complete as you type so that both "java" and "javascript" show up in the auto-complete's suggestion list when you type "java" in. In the above example, a person would type in 'rails' and see the 'rubyonrails' auto-complete, and (hopefully) choose that instead.
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Great idea!
It would be great if you could expand the areas of expertise though. For example, I have significant expertise with cloud computing, EC2 deployment, scaling, MongoDB, but there's nowhere to mention this. I also have expertise deploying Rails in production, the different possible setups, etc. Just checking off "Rails" is a bit broad.
Thanks!
Yep, mcrittenden recommended a tag system (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2176517) in the first thread. I'll just quote him:
I'd like the hardcoded areas of expertise removed in favor of an autocomplete freeform box, much like Stack Overflow's tags box. For example, I'd like to put that I'm a Drupal expert and I'd like to look for node.js help, but neither of those are options.
Oh boy. I totally missed that. Thanks.
I'm not sure a tagging system is the best option though. It's very flexible indeed but it's at the expense of the simplicity of checkboxes. Especially when many tags mean the same thing. eg: rails and rubyonrails.
Since "hacker" expertise is a limited scope, perhaps expanding from there is a better idea?
The problem I see with this is it might not be all that limited. There are quite a few areas of expertise out there, which could make for quite a large form, where as defined "sections" with a free form tag style fill in would make for less clutter. Its "hackers" were talking about after all, most if not all are going to be familiar with a tag system.
As far as the duplicate tags there a number of ways to correct this. First and most prominent is community editing. The other option is to tie tags together with a backend system - for example ruby-on-rails === rubyonrails === rails === RoR
Maybe you could use the best of both approaches by presenting the most popular/important/broad tags (e.g. PHP, usability, CPC) as a suggested list while allowing users to add their own, more specific or less popular tags (e.g. drupal, memcached, adsense, appengine).
Or (as long as it's performant), an auto-complete as you type so that both "java" and "javascript" show up in the auto-complete's suggestion list when you type "java" in. In the above example, a person would type in 'rails' and see the 'rubyonrails' auto-complete, and (hopefully) choose that instead.
Other areas: embedded development, networking, shell scripting, Lua, electronic systems