License to Brag: Showcase Your Coding Achievements on Geeklist

Kira M. Newman February 18, 2012 Tweet

Talk to many programmers, and they’ll tell you they’re the unsung heroes of the modern world – toiling away on work their superiors dictate at the last minute, interrupted during their flashes of genius, and generally misunderstood by the masses.

More seriously, we all have a psychological desire to have our successes acknowledged, and San Francisco startup Geeklist was created partly to fulfill that need.

“We built Geeklist to showcase and uproot all of the great achievements of developers around the world, to give them a voice and let them brag,” explains cofounder Reuben Katz. Katz faced some of the above issues as a designer, but the inspiration for the project lies with cofounder and CTO Christian Sanz.

The Geeklist private beta features a feed like Twitter, with followers and 120-character posts (you can cross-post to Twitter, and Geeklist adds a URL). You can publish micro-achievements or achievement cards, add contributors to your projects, and give fellow coders high-fives. Geeklist recently added code pages showcasing particular code you built (most with links to GitHub) and updates during the development process.

The site has already attracted Dave McClure, Robert Scoble, and developers at Facebook, Google, and Twitter. While the coders get inspired by others, the recruiters can find skilled developers – although Katz hastens to add that Geeklist is not a recruiting engine. More subtly, it lets you personally keep track of your work; if your startup fails and you’re left wondering if it was a waste of time, your Geeklist records can remind you what you learned and created.

But do we need another social network? According to Katz, Geeklist is more than just a social network; geeks can share things that would be seen as bragging elsewhere:

“We provide something no other place has ever done, a safe zone to share and showcase based on actual achievements and…providing in depth knowledge of who built what, where, with who, how they built it, with what technologies, and even who verifies it.”

Still, as for many social networks, gaining users is the biggest challenge. So Geeklist recruits international ambassadors to help the site go viral.

Geeklist is an alternate in the 2012 SXSW Accelerator in social media and social networking. To join their geekosystem (glad I was able to slip that word in), go to Geekli.st/invite/founders and use the code “bloodymary.”