My name’s Nathaniel. I’m a co-founder of a new company called
MetaBright. I think what we’ve made would be of interest to a lot of
people here, so I wanted to briefly tell you about it and ask for your
feedback.
We built MetaBright because we believe that people should be recognized
for their skills and abilities. We think it’s better to demonstrate what
you can DO as a programmer, as opposed to saying what companies you’ve
worked for, or where you went to school. And when you can be a part of a
community of talented people all showing off their chops, we think
learning programming (or any skill really) is way easier and more
enjoyable.
For people who are new to programming or Ruby, you can use MB to track
your initial progress, discover what to learn next, and get inspired by
the awesome answers of our community.
For people who are already experienced programmers, you can use MB to
demonstrate and showcase your skills, while casually competing with
others. And who knows, you might learn a thing or two as well
I liked the site a lot! I’d say my biggest piece of feedback is that
there needs to be a steady stream of new questions coming in. I
completed all the ‘arena’ questions pretty quickly. When do you think
you’ll have more stuff posted?
I’ve tried creating some questions on the site, but I can’t figure out
how to put newlines in, which destroys the readability of the code
samples I was using to create questions.
Any chance of sorting that issue out?
Donald: Thanks! Glad you’re enjoying it! We post new questions
occasionally to the Challenges, but are really looking to our users to
create questions that they think are good indicators of competence.
We’re still playing with the best way to incentivize question creation
while ensuring the overall quality of the content, but right now, once
you achieve 300 points in a Challenge, you can publish questions. And as
you publish high-quality questions, you have the opportunity to earn
more points. So if you’ve already passed 300 points, we’d certainly love
it if you’d submit some questions!
Joel: Thank you for submitting some really awesome responses (I
especially loved this one: http://www.metabright.com/paths/rubyonrails/submission/262) and for
attempting to publish some questions! We have to resolve a small Git
issue before we can push new changes. But yes, as soon as we’re able to,
we’ll submit a push that allows for some basic formatting in the
question field that will also include the ability to place line breaks.
I’ll post here again when we get it live.
And by the way, thank you for taking the initiative to try and create
your own Challenge! The flow is pretty janky right now, but we’re
working on making it cleaner.
Thanks for looking into it, I like the concept.
By the way, the “optional” image when creating a challenge isn’t
optional. Might be worth changing either the description or the code
there.
Yep, just recently pushed changes to fix the spacing issue!
All Challenges that get created have to be approved by an admin. (Sorry
this message wasn’t communicated when you were creating the challenge –
it was originally an admin-only tool, until, well, two days ago.) We
just approved your Challenge, and moved it into the Hacker Persona.
Looks like someone fixed the lines issue.
Now it looks as though my challenge isn’t published? I’ve tried to
unpublish & republish, but it won’t let me as it’s the only one I’ve
made.
Good man! I even bought the Deluxe version of BTD5
One idea you might find useful: Allow timer adjustment on the quiz
section. Some of the questions I wrote seem a bit fiendish given the
speed of the timer.
Ha! I would have found your Challenge fiendish no matter how much time I
had! Allowing the timer to be adjusted on a per question basis is
something we’re definitely going to do. Possibly along with the options
of not having the countdown penalize the users’ scores, and disabling
the timer entirely.
Hi, Hans. Sorry that you found the registration annoying. We felt it was
important that people use their real identities, and having a social
sign-in was the easiest way to encourage this. While this choice
certainly turns off some people, we felt it would facilitate a healthier
community for the people who did chose to sign up. So thank you for
choosing to register, and I hope you enjoy the platform.
We thought it was important for scores and submissions to be visible to
everyone. (A little bit about our philosophy can be found here: www.metabright.com/about) There are always opportunities to improve your
score if you’re unsatisfied with your current point total. More
important than the number of points you earn are the responses you
submit because we think these are a better demonstrator of people’s
growth and abilities. If you’d prefer for none of this to be visible,
unfortunately the only thing I can suggest is to delete your account.
You can do so by editing your profile, and clicking the “Remove Account”
button.
In any case, the addictive nature of the “achievement” system is a great
way to get website traffic. And remember, if something is free, then
you’re the commodity!
Joel: I agree with your post. Thanks for sharing those articles. I
especially liked the Calacanis piece – I’m going to start using his
term, IAS. I do believe that the Internet is becoming less anonymous
because people value real connections (connections that can be tied back
to the physical world), and that this is a good thing.
Joel: I agree with your post. Thanks for sharing those articles. I
especially liked the Calacanis piece – I’m going to start using his
term, IAS. I do believe that the Internet is becoming less anonymous
because people value real connections (connections that can be tied back
to the physical world), and that this is a good thing.
As an Aspie myself, I often find it difficult to identify with people
unless we share an interest. Networking sites are a useful way to link
via interests rather than proximity or random chance
Amen! I always find that my lasting relationships are the ones where we
share similar interests as opposed to shared experiences. And in the
social networking sphere, I think that’s why services like Google+
resonates much more with me than say, Facebook.
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