So, I’ve become a consumer of our own product, and I am happy to report that “the dogfood tastes great”. This weekend, It looks like I’m all set to BeWelcome surf in Paris. I didn’t even bother to try with Couchsurfing.com because I knew that although only 1000 members, BeWelcome seems to already be getting enough geographic coverage. Having not been involved in usability of either CS or BW (I’m a database guy), it was refreshing to see how much more intuitive BeWelcome already is. Top marks to the devs.
Author Archive for morgo
On August 2nd, Couchsurfing Announced that they were looking to hire a full time developer. I look back today (August 10th) and I notice that:
***We Are No Longer Accepting Applications***
I’m not sure what day they posted this notice, but it seems a very short period of time to advertise a vacancy. I always suspected that announcing this was just to escape criticism about “hiring all of Casey’s friends”. I guess soon we will get to see who the developer is, and if it is indeed a familiar face.
[I've copied this from my blog, here] So, a couple of months after resigning from CouchSurfing.com I’m ready to announce I’ve started my own project that I’m calling “share the love” (it’s a working name, but I like it so far).I like what BeWelcome.org is working on, but I figured that I had some ideas I wanted to try out that would mesh better in its own system.Here are a few of them:
- Network driven searching (people who are friends, or friends of friends show up in search results first).
- “Couchme” reserve couchsurfing (Ask someone to come stay on your couch).
- Tagging (more on this later).
I’m predicting critics will say that it will be difficult to compete with Couchsurfing.com because it has critical mass. That’s not really how I’m measuring success in this case; since my goal if more for people to download the software and run their own hospitality exchange networks. I’m planning some webservices-foo so that networks will be able to exchange information and search across each-others user base. Having a distributed system might help reduce some of big-brother problems I have with Couchsurfing.com (or about any other social network). You can check out the project here: Share the love.
I woke up this morning to find that the finances have been posted here. It’s good news indeed. I’m yet to take a closer look myself though; I’m surprised that travel related expenses were so high.
I said I would continue to contribute if it does “more good than harm,” but I’ve decided to change my stance on an issue, and I’m resigning from the CS dev team & mailing lists.
Prior to working on couchsurfing, I decided that I only wanted to work on Open Source software. When I heard that Kasper was pushing for couch surfing to be open it sparked my interest.
Open source is important to me, because it represents a freedom of information and ideas. But for the record, it wasn’t the non-opensource thing that made me leave per-se; it’s the resistance & lack of communication to comment on, or work towards a New NDA.
Maybe I should hang on and wait, because something is right around the corner?
These issues are old, months old. Now I’m cynical enough to think a delay or a ‘not now’ is a politically correct way of saying ‘no’. So, I’m now changing my tactic; If they get addressed then I’ll rejoin.
There’s no reason we need a non-compete clause. I had contemplated signing a non-compete that still permits me to just work for MySQL; but now I’ve decided I’ll choose who I work for.
I had some good times at the Collective. My two most treasured memories include learning how to drink scotch and beer with Gardner (a first for me, and a lesson that will no doubt further me in life), and performance hacking with Joe & Kasper in a 3-way screen, sitting next to each other.
Walter: I’d like to still come and visit the Collective, but I’m withdrawing my request to participate. I enjoyed seeing your comments on MySQL optimization, and that you could also spot so many of the changes that needed doing. It’s unfortunate we didn’t really get the
change to work together.
I’ll still keep couchsurfing like everyone else, so keep making the site better!
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