BackerKit's company blog covers its crowdfunding fulfillment platform, along with engineering posts on Rails, Postgres event sourcing, Docker and distributed teams.
HN links it mostly through BackerKit's hiring posts and as an example of a Kickstarter fulfillment service, alongside similar crowdfunding support companies.
I can second this recommendation, and broaden it to everything James Burke has ever done for BBC. He is an amazing science scholar, and also quite witty. He makes amazing educational programming. I especially enjoy Connections[1] and its sequel series, as well as the lesser-known The Day the Universe Changed[2] series, about the impact of science and technology on society, from a philosophical point-of-view, rather than the mainly technical approach of Connections.
If anyone close to him is reading this, please thank him for me. I saw Connections many years ago, and he opened my eyes to the wonder of inventions. Anyone can make things. That’s how we got to today, just lots of interworking inventions. He changed my life.
An excerpt from his Wikipedia page[3] I think HN readers may find intriguing:
> Burke conceived a mobile app called Connections that would search Wikipedia and generate associations and connections among apparently unrelated fields of knowledge or topics. Surprises, anomalies, and unexpected perspectives on a search could emerge from using the app. According to Burke, the Connections app would be an innovative alternative to more linear internet search engines such as Google.[12] As of January 2017 the project had met only 1/3 of its Kickstarter crowdfunding goal.[13]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Universe_Changed
[3]…
BackerKit (YC W13) | San Francisco, CA | Onsite | https://www.backerkit.com
BackerKit is the best way for crowdfunding creators to manage their backers, help fulfill their campaign on time, and allow them to focus on what they love doing—making something awesome! We've helped thousands of creators to raise over $115M, supporting them in everything from surveys to shipping.
To learn more about who we are, our engineering culture, and whether this is the right place for you, read our Key Values profile: https://www.keyvalues.com/backerkit
Here are our open roles:
- Senior Software Developer: https://jobs.lever.co/backerkit/488b7d87-8ead-4ac4-91cb-59a3d1c0f168?lever-source=key-values
Tech Stack: Ruby (2.5 at the time of writing)
Ruby on Rails (5.1)
Backbone.js
Postgres
Redis
BackerKit (YC W13) | San Francisco, CA | Onsite | https://www.backerkit.com
BackerKit is the best way for crowdfunding creators to manage their backers, help fulfill their campaign on time, and allow them to focus on what they love doing—making something awesome! We've helped thousands of creators to raise over $115M, supporting them in everything from surveys to shipping.
To learn more about who we are, our engineering culture, and whether this is the right place for you, read our Key Values profile: https://www.keyvalues.com/backerkit
Here are our open roles:
- Senior Developer: https://jobs.lever.co/backerkit/488b7d87-8ead-4ac4-91cb-59a3d1c0f168?lever-source=hacker-news
Tech Stack: Ruby (2.5 at the time of writing), Ruby on Rails (5.1), Backbone.js, Postgres, Redis
https://www.backerkit.com/projects/c-smile/open-source-sciter-engine
It's a bit bleak indeed.
The "open-sourcing the sciter" post [0] has gained almost no traction, news coverage [1] etc. This hn thread is the first time I heard of this kickstarter myself.
I think with a bit of marketing, the goal is absolutely reachable. Also there are plenty of grants and foundations that support open source projects. It's likely that with the right application they'll donate the needed amount, but usually they work quite slowly. Likely won't happen in the remaining 53 hours.
[0]: https://terrainformatica.com/2020/09/07/open-sourcing-the-sciter/
[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=sciter+open+source&tbm=nws&source=lnt&tbs=qdr:m
As I understand it: Project creators log in to Kickstarter and utilize a Chrome bookmarklet provided by BackerKit, which then reads/scrapes the backer infomation from Kickstarter and sends it to BackerKit.[1]
It's kind of messy, but frankly ingenious considering there's no alternatives.
One of BackerKit's founders is/was involved with Diaspora, which was a Kickstarter project. Having the Kickstarter project admin interface (with actual backers) handy to develop and test the bookmarklet against was probably quite a boon. I could be wrong, though.
tl;dr Kickstarter really needs an API.
[1] https://www.backerkit.com/faq
Interesting, this is like the second Kickstarter support company I've heard of in as many days - a KS I supported is using BackerKit[1] to help manage their fulfillment.
There's also Topatoco's Make That Thing[2], though that's currently invite-only, mostly to people who're already part of the Topatoco empire.
This is definitely a new flavor of B2B service opening up. If I wasn't so busy working on the content for my next comic-book kickstarter, I'd be trying to see if I can come up with a spin on it myself...
[1]: https://www.backerkit.com
[2]: http://makethatthing.com