Ask HN: Review my idea | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review my idea

16 pointsolalonde15 comments

I was thinking of building a website where users can upload a screencast of their workflow / productivity environment and view other user's environments.

For instance, as a web developer, I would send a short screencast of what my typical work environment looks: my Netbeans IDE, my WAMP setup, my web browser with the web developer and firebug addons, etc.

This would be interesting for people looking forward to increase their productivity and see how others in their field are working. In my own experience, I've learned a lot of productivity tips from my co-workers and I think this kind of service could be helpful for home workers who can't take a look at the next cubicle ;)

What does HN think of my idea ? Any suggestion ?

View on HN

Why not give it a shot using a simple site/blog and YouTube? You could first make your own screencast and post it up in a blog article. Then recruit a handful of your friends to make their screencasts. If the project still seems fun and you are seeing some user interest, then think about building the site out. MVP ;-)

Good idea ;) Lean and clean.

It'd be sweet if the recordings were of people actually creating something well known. For example, if you could say "here's a screencast of how the Twitter prototype was built".

In a similar vein, I remember an Etherpad recording of PG writing an essay. At the time, it was one of the coolest things I've seen, and would love to see more famous writings composed in such manner.

Founders at work, literally.

That's a good idea but I'm not sure how I would go about getting some famous developers to send a screencast of them at work!

The sharing of environment configuration is very common among high end WoW raid guilds -- we did this on a regular basis and would see significant statistically measurable improvements when people setup their interface for specific encounters.

The process of going through and explaining each step in your workflow and why it is setup that way helps even with limited collaboration. The drawback to this is environment configuration is very specific to the type of project, size of your team, and the development process you follow.

In order for this to succeed as a site you'll need to pick a niche (like any startup should, boiling the ocean is hard) and build an audience around that -- i.e. developers using Netbeans on C++ projects using buildbot for CI in an agile environment. I use this example as you cite Netbeans in your idea and you thus probably know others using it giving you the start of a community.

It is a good idea but there is a fundamental problem, I believe. The developers who have a great environment may not have any incentive to share it, and a lot of other who share may lead to spam/not-so-useful screencasts which may be laborious to clean (even if you use the community to rate it). Also how do you think this service will make money?

I haven't thought of a revenue model yet: just throwing the idea out to see if that's something people would actually like. Getting developers to share their work environment would indeed be a challenge. Perhaps, a karma system a la StackOverflow/HN could be used as an incentive. Developers on StackOverflow don't mind helping each others out so I don't see why it wouldn't work with my proposed format. I have to admit though that making a screencast is time consuming and the karma incentive might not be enough to balance.

Another option that was mentioned in the comments was to ask "celebrity" developers to share their workspace. Celebrities usually like free publicity so I believe that might be a viable option to start out.

I like the idea.

I really like this site which I believe I found via a hackernews comment sometime back:

http://usesthis.com/

It performs a similar function, albeit exclusive to their hardware and software setup, and a screencast and more detail would be interesting.

Pretty similar indeed. Thanks for sharing the link.

I think that's a cool idea. I've always enjoyed Lifehacker's pieces on the Featured Workspace as well as their Featured Desktop articles, because I like seeing fresh ideas for arranging my home/office and desktop. I would definitely enjoy seeing the same for workflow environments.

The ability to diff two environments would also be useful, it would allow you to find folks that were close to yours but different (e.g. same tools different settings) vs. different tools.

Make doing screencasts with voice easier and then I'll get back to you.

it can't be too productive spending your time watching other people be productive..

On the short time it isn't but on the long term it can be. I've spent a few hours reading on version control a few years ago and I've been more productive since then ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com