In less than a month marcvs has setup an AWS server, installed racket and arc, tweaked the arc codebase and the HN app, configured email, and translated all the copy in the HN codebase to spanish. All this without having much programming experience at all. Kudos!
Today I made some minor changes in the News app... I changed the gray arrow icon, because many visitors weren't realizing they were supposed to vote the stories, and now the stories open in another tab.
I've been working at big newspapers/news companies here in Brazil for many years, but I'm not that happy with these companies strategies, so I decided to try some side project...
I don't know much about programming, so I decided to try something that was really simple. I'm a reader of Hacker News, discovered it's open source, and started looking for how to set up a clone. São Paulo is a really large city (11,32 million people live here), but we lack hubs to connect all these people (I think our news companies aren't doing that very well). So, I came up with this idea of applying the HN concept to a local news project.
To be honest, my main goal here is to learn more about programming and other technical stuff, so, it's been an awesome experience. The site runs on Amazon Linux AMI, and the majority of users are still my friends and the friends of my friends. (I finished the translation work yesterday). :P
It will be a pleasure to share more data with you in the following weeks! And thanks for all the help and support I found here.
PS.: "Espaço" can be translated as "Space", or a generic place. It's a common word in portuguese.
Congratulations on all you've done starting even as a non-programmer. I'm impressed. Although I've been programming for decades, I have little experience in Arc or Lisp and have found the folks on this forum to be friendly and helpful.
Many years ago I lived in Brasil for about 2 years. Part of that time I spent in Sao Paulo: Pinheiros, Jacana, Santa and Jabaquara. Still have good memories of that time.
