Sourcing.io Feedback

gistfile1.md

Hey Alex,

I just signed up for sourcing.io. I'm not looking to hire, it was to get a demo of the system. Some feedback / questions:

• giving you my CC data for a quick demo feels weird. Can't you suspend the account after $x searches or $x days and require the CC data then?
• I signed up to see what my personal profile looked like. The only way I could find myself was through a direct search for my name. The filters didn't really work. Maybe this can be made accessible without login?
• You seem to have my github account, but not my twitter. Works for Sven but not me
• You're not looking at the github repositories of organizations - DalekJS isn't showing up for Sebastian
• I can't find Jörn Zaefferer (jQueryUI, QUnit) at all
• What's the color coding of the projects supposed to mean? some are red, is that bad? There's no tooltip explaining the intention
• I can star a person in the search results, but the UI doesn't explain what this is for
• accessing an unknown user results in a bad entry in the lower left "recently viewed" section
• I don't get if there's some sort of logic behind the sorting of results or not

You're currently reading and interpreting data that is just there. The interpretation part is worrying me. For example I generally live in "Germany" (it's a country, about the size of Texas). I travel a lot and I'm open to relocation. That fact makes me a candidate for everyone, including companies at the north pole. Yet that fact can't show up in your search. Also there's data and profiles on the web you won't be able to link easily. These are examples for information that a developer would have to provide. Why don't you set up a JSON structure (a la package.json) to allow developers to provide that custom data. Make them host the file in a github repo called "sourcing.io" (or something). That way you don't have to provide developer accounts, we don't have to sign up and forget the credentials. The existence of such a repo also indicates interest in being hired in the first place…

Hi Rodney,

First off - sorry for the slow response! We really appreciate this kind of feedback, and I wish I'd got back to you sooner. As to your points:

1. We definitely debated this a lot internally. However, we decided on going this route since it really shows intention to actually pay (something we've had a problem with in the past). We email every receipt we get though, and offer a 6 month money back guarantee.
2. We definitely want to expose this to developers without signup/payment in the future. Especially since devs can then add/remove/correct information, and indicate whether they want to be contacted.
3. Unfortunately we haven't been able to pick up everyone's information - we're trying to fill the gaps in our db though.
4. We're adding this feature in the next few weeks.
5. Thanks, we've fixed this (was due to foreign chars in the name) and are pushing soon.
6. Red just means popular. I agree, this isn't obvious - we'll add a notation.
7. Starring is just a convenient way to find people later (like gmail starring). You can filter by all starred people.
8. Thanks for the heads up - will fix
9. There's a ton of logic, and different weights depending on whether you've starred the person before, whether someone in your team is connected to them, whether they are prolific on GitHub, and some randomness to keep results fresh.

Agreed - there's so much data we're missing just because we haven't implemented the developer side of the application. It's something that desperately needs doing, and it's definitely on our roadmap.

Again, thanks so much! And if you've any more questions, feel free to ping me anytime at [email protected]

Alex