hackerb.io

It’s been a hacky Easter weekend. Besides finally fixing the backend on Angus’s site, closing the doors on Brick and putting together this blog, I’ve also had a chance to dust off my little CV generating app, hackerb.io.

Despite hosting my resume for months, the site hasn’t been open to signups before today, so I figured this was the time to blog. Caveat: it is still very beta alpha, you can touch it as easy as break it. Please be patient and mail me when things fall over.

I Hate Mice

Instructing users in plain text always feels a little wrong. Interfaces should be intuitive, right? Still, I’d bet I’m not the only one whose mind gets regularly blown by some hotkey I never knew existed, from Github’s T to Gmail’s * then A. What I wouldn’t give for a standard way of letting users know what keyboard shortcuts are available to them. In the absence of that, hackerb.io’s home screen is given over more or less entirely to telling you to press tab. Do it though, seriously. Then press shift+tab. Then tab again. Now we’re cookin’.

I Like Coloured Circles

If you’ve ever wanted to input a list of the technologies you know into a web app through the medium of regex and flying coloured circles, well, do I have good news for you!

Bonus points for expressing your life’s learning in a single /expression/!

Once you get behind the fancy reg path, the app isn’t much more than a Prawn (<3) renderer (albeit quite a nice one), with a little Markdown parsing thrown in for for good measure. It’s running on Rails 3.1 and MongoDB.

Let me know what you think!