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Is PolyWork the new LinkedIn for Developers?

Andrew Brown ๐Ÿ‡จ๐Ÿ‡ฆ on June 17, 2021

P.S. I just want to frontload this article to ask you what is your opinion about the new professional network? I'd love to read the comments. I wan...
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Mark Ramrattan

I think if I didnโ€™t read your blog about the negative effects on user mental health with social media statistics. I would have thought it was a forthcoming feature not yet released (liking posts). Great idea to go down that route. Would be great if they promoted that as a main characteristic too.

I like the angle of creating better attestment. Youโ€™re right anyone can endorse anyone falsely via LinkedIn or the current processes we have in place. I still think we need something even more deeper than activity based endorsement. If I took your free course but never interacted with you personally. I think that would be wrong of me to ask you for endorsement in that scenario. Maybe if it had, who you worked with in the activity with direct links to the project work and the examples of the areas you contributed.

Took me a minute to switch from no search box and exploring via area / people / tags. Definitely growing on me, looking forward to seeing how this platform develops. Weirdly, I prefer the experience more on the web version rather than on my mobile.

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Andrew Brown ๐Ÿ‡จ๐Ÿ‡ฆ

I think user search is coming but yet to be implemented.

Full text search can be tricky to get right and since I noticed their platform was built with Ruby on Rails and hosted on Heroku I imagine it wasn't in their wheelhouse to roll out easily.

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Mark Ramrattan

What's your thoughts on Polywork speed of development / releasing features? I was just thinking about Clubhouse and how Twitter Spaces and now Facebook Live Audio rooms have come on the market. I'm sure polywork alternatives will start popping up. I wonder what it will take to continually grow in this space. Maybe that would involve companies only recruiting via Polyworkโ€ฆ

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GrahamTheDev • Edited

They really need to do something about performance if they want to entice developers there, nearly 4 second load time for your profile on a monster connection is just not going to work. (I then ran Page Speed Insights - yeah it isn't good and it will hurt your readership numbers).

Then there is accessibility - or lack of it.

Looks like they have the right idea - throw all their resources at marketing, something most devs forget about, but I think they have already made some pretty poor choices to try and get a MVP out the door that are going to hurt them when they try to scale and their seed funding will just go up in smoke.

And the final worrying thing - is this not built by the same guy who built Lystable (which seems to have changed name to Kalo and is now defunct as far as I can tell - or their whole site just happens to be down). Patterns like that are a red flag sometimes to be aware of.

I could be (and hope) I am wrong as I am not overly familiar with Kalo and Lystable and if someone has some better info that would be great as in principle I like the idea behind polywork, just cautious where I invest my time I suppose!

At the end of the day though, great article and thank you for introducing me to polywork - I will watch on and hope it becomes what it claims to be and people can point at this comment and laugh at me in the future! โค๐Ÿฆ„

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Andrew Brown ๐Ÿ‡จ๐Ÿ‡ฆ

Profiles were really slow but they fixed it the other day bringing the load times from 1420ms to 350ms

twitter.com/PolyworkHQ/status/1407...

While that is large improvement 350ms would not meet my technical standard. On my apps 200m is the highest load times with average of 100ms

I noticed they are using Ruby on Rails and Heroku. So likely it is backed by Postgres, and not a graphing database (which is what they should be using for a social network).

I think they are using turbo, so that means Rails is doing the rendering.

Heroku is terrible for scaling and gets expensive really fast. I'd hope to see them migrate to AWS but they might not have the cloud knowledge in house to make the leap.

This reminds me of DEV where they too were once on Heroku and so they ended up relying too much on third-party services which lead to a long development cycle and and maybe why we see such neglect of their community building which used to be the strongest aspect of DEV.

Polywork is bringing lots of people in the door, but there is not much to do the platform, and I think they should have had a community engagement plan in place.

Complaints aside I think they're doing well, we'll just have to see long term how it plays out.

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GrahamTheDev

Their Time To First Byte is now between 0.7 and 1.6 seconds on your profile. Which is a bit better than it was but not sure where they get 350ms from? (I am on the web version)

A really good analysis of some of the backend pain points and decisions that will hurt them! Lets hope they have a plan to get around those!

Front end wise (not going to do such a great deep dig as you did here, just the easy win!) the 2*mb* (and that is Gzipped - 6.8mb total!) of font awesome JS is one quick win they could improve on ๐Ÿ˜‹๐Ÿคฃ

It will be interesting to see when they start trying to get pages to rank!

I will watch on in interest, I hope you do a follow up in a couple of months on whether you get any engagement etc.

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Mandar Vaze • Edited

@andrewbrown I think you meant to say "GPT3 and CopyAPI" when you said "GLP3" :)

I'll delete this comment later. Don't mean to point of mistake in public, not sure of dev.to allows DM for such scenario

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Andrew Brown ๐Ÿ‡จ๐Ÿ‡ฆ

Its okay. I make mistakes in spelling all the time.
I don't mind when people point it out.
Thank you for noticing!

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ItsASine (Kayla)

Notification that Andrew Brown followed you on Polywork

Well, you're quick haha

I found a code on Twitter and figured I'd give it a shot, though I'm mostly going to hold off until I can figure out how indexed profiles are. Real work as Kayla with real named employers and fun work as ItsASine do not mix in public spaces.

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Benjamin Rancourt

I am #12814 on the waitlist. I think I will wait a bit before trying this new product lol. Can you send me a VIP access code?

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Andrew Brown ๐Ÿ‡จ๐Ÿ‡ฆ

send me a DM here on Twitter or DEV

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Joshua Alpuerto

Hey, if you could send me a code also that would be great. I would love to try it. Thanks!

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Rita {FlyNerd} Lyczywek • Edited

Hi! I can't send you DM on Twitter, but I'd love to join Polywork ๐Ÿ˜œ

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Charlie J Smotherman

Why not just have Polyworks AI directly negotiate with the AI's that the recruiting services use and have a system that actually puts people to work.

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Andrew Brown ๐Ÿ‡จ๐Ÿ‡ฆ

I love this idea.

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Christophe El-Khoury

Tried signing up, was countered with the waitlist?

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Lee Wynne

This looks very interesting, great write up. Could you send me an invite? I canโ€™t sign up.

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claudior

Yet another social network