With almost 700 (!) developers on RailsDevs it's becoming harder for individual folks to stand out after they fall off the homepage. Here are some ideas to resurface developers to potential employers.
Both of these can help surface developers who recently tweaked their profile. This is great if someone joined the site a while back but is now looking for something new. Or revamped their profile to better position themselves.
The downside is that it might encourage folks to make frequent, tiny changes to ensure they stay at the top of the list.
Currently, admins can feature a developer for one week. They appear at the top of search results when no additional criteria is selected.
This works but requires too much manual intervention to be effective in its current form. Something more automated and less prone to potential bias is required.
Admins could define a set list of Rails-related questions for developers to answer and display on their profile. This could help businesses learn more about the candidate before reaching out.
The downside is that it would be hard to surface these in search results – it only really helps while you are on a developer’s profile page.
Alternatively, a digest of answers to a single question could be sent out at a regular cadence. This has the added benefit of offering paid subscribers another benefit with their subscription or keeping RailsDevs top-of-mind for folks who haven’t paid, yet.
Since RailsDevs is open source it could make sense to highlight contributors. A badge on search results would highlight folks quite distinctly from others in the list. The badge could link to their commits on GitHub, too.
It could also be extended to “recent contributors” (last X months) to discourage a single contribution and then never touching the codebase again.
The downside for this idea is it would require OAuth with GitHub. While not a huge lift, it would be a decent chunk of work in implementation, UX, and from the developers themselves.
Randomly ordering the search results could be a fun way to surface different folks without any additional work on the developer’s end. The downside is that revisiting a saved search result (via URL params) and the order being different could be unsettling.