HuntYourTribe: How it all started

Programming and software development have been the heart and soul of my daily professional routine for a decade now. “Monday blues, Monday again”, I often hear this whisper at the start of the week in our bay, while I have always been anxious to start the process of software development after the weekend break with my tribe. Yes, the process of software development with my tribe, who don’t care about Monday or Friday, who are curious to learn from my project, peers, OSS, or from the world.

Process of software development

Software development as a standalone, to be frank, is dull. Sitting in front of a laptop for 8 hours writing Ruby or Python code doesn’t seem exciting long-term. There is only a finite syntax for programming a language. Maybe 1000 rules. But what motivates me as an engineer is the product ideas that come out of it, deadlock, race conditions causing servers to hang, problem statements that end users are experiencing in their real life, so I can hand over digital solutions that could aid or alleviate user problems. These all make sense short-term term like an aspirin shot.

But what are our vitamins that would fuel us long term?

I believe peer-to-peer learning has always been my vital vitamin that has made me confident, elastic, resilient in this industry for a decade now and years to come.

Peer Tribe learning

Sapiens, a wonderful book on human evolution, one chapter that struck me the most: how historically humans thrived as tribes.  

Adults always seek a powerful tribe that empowers them with tools, weapons, confidence, knowledge, leadership skills, battlefield training, hunting, and all dimensions of survival skills. Individuals evangelize tribes. Tribes create ideas and turn them into reality and revolutions.

Fast forward today, and the framework hasn’t changed much.

A friend introduces me to a new OSS project, and a peer group gathers and creates a massive OS called Linux.

A friend introduces me to one customer user pain point, and a peer group gathers and creates a startup, and becomes a big corporation.

A friend introduces me to a hobby project he is working on. God knows why and what it will become. A peer group gathers, invents a new market for a world that never existed, and coins it as social media. Facebook, X emerges. 

What excites me today and the next 30 years in this industry is the peers I will be part of, the things I will be learning in the process, and the products I will be creating. Challenges and opportunities lying ahead with or without AI

Tribe building

We constantly look for like-minded peers on the internet, at networking events, teams, open source projects, hiring, social networks, etc. We don’t just look at who they are, but more at what they do. Actions reflect character. In this era, peer-to-peer connections happen even between the North Pole and the South Pole. Thanks to the internet and science.  But let’s not go to the extent that derails our focus for now. The most common ones are team hiring,  small member tribe building a startup.

ATS & resume drama

God forbid resumes. Been on both sides of the interview process. As an interviewer who has taken more than 1000 interviews.  Most resumes look like an audit trail of hops of companies, a high-level project overview. Built auth, microservice, chat system, etc. Why would we need to go through 4 to 5 rounds of interviews if everything is there in PDF? Maybe just to validate authenticity, in-depth details of what's there in the resume.

Even post that,  most hiring managers whine about a low interview-to-conversion ratio. A process that we followed over many decades or centuries still produces low results. 

As an interviewee, I felt preparing a resume is one of the laziest and dumbest things after all the cognitive load one has to go through to decide to quit one's current job. More scary one to recollect and dump years of my work in bullet points.

I hardly hop jobs. 10 years, 2 hops, and now building a startup huntyourtribe.com.

Somebody help me prepare my resume!

Resume. Lacks authenticity, lacks depth, and is boring. All these ATS tools are just optimized to keep track of resumes.

Nothing more than that!

Better Portfolios

In today’s world, showcasing your professional work on the internet has 0 barriers. 

If you are still hesitant to do so, then at some point you pause to fill out a boring resume and apply to those boring ATS. Either way, your work somewhere will be documented and shared.

Buying a domain and building a portfolio is a good first step towards sharing and showcasing your work and knowledge to the world.

To some extent, it is updated to date, giving more context of the thought process, current learning of professionals, blogs, etc. 

It is a better digitized version of a resume, easy to share, edit, and republish. 

But still, it is static, standalone, read-only,  and non-pluggable to any ATS systems or professional networking. Some disconnect.

Something I felt was a missing puzzle in this whole chain. Not sure what!

Professional networking sites drama

Better than a resume but less than a portfolio. At least in a portfolio, you own the narrative of your professional first impression. Visiting https://ramit.in/, a highly focused data presentation of the professional journey of an individual. If the visitor's primary intention is to know more about the individual, then this seems to be a better way to express.

But professional networking sites seem to have a lot of ads, distractions, zero personalization, and flexibility. Not sure, something messy here. I can’t sometimes say this is my profile

At max, professionals can do is fill all the forms with predefined fields and start shouting by creating posts just for the sake of applying for jobs.

 And why do they charge for creating job posts in this social network era?

We just hired our founding interns with a simple tweet.

No ATS, No resume, No portfolio

I could see this pattern everywhere.

For God's sake, recently my feed in one famous professional networking site(you know which one) had marriage photos posted by one of my followers. 

Next moment, I shut down my Mac and thought it would be better if I simply sit.

Better world may exists but unexplored

Something distorted, blurry, not right today. Not sure how many are with me on this.

Now I am going deep into this mess, exploring and trying to straighten up some things.

I may be wrong or may find little success in this path. I would rather try something deep to clean this mess than sit and scratch this itch all day.

It doesn’t matter whether it is a resume or a portfolio website. 

It doesn’t matter if it is the pre-AI era or the post-AI era.

At the end of the day, one's work, journey, setbacks, failures, logical mental models, expertise, learnings, and actions speak louder, become more powerful if it is expressed in a clean, structured, organised, shareable, and actionable way for your peer group to let them into their tribe.

We are building HuntYourTribe, keeping these fundamental principles at the core. 

A new age platform for professionals to build and express their professional journey, broken down into chapters.

We believe every professional deserves a professional bio or a Wikipedia page of their own.

More importantly, centralized, hyper-personalized, and shareable.  

Today, I still don’t have an answer to many of our questions. 

But we are learning and rediscovering ourselves every day!

Kathir, ramit

huntyourtribe.com

-- authored by, kathir