Gittip has a new look, thanks to a collaboration between Damon Chin, Nick Sergeant, and myself (Chad Whitacre). The site launched seven months ago with a spartan user experience, and early on we recognized the need to do better. Within a month, Damon had contributed design files for a new visual design for the site. Damon is an employee of Gittip’s close partner, Balanced Payments, and I’m grateful to both for the contribution. The design languished, however, for lack of someone to implement it in markup and integrate it with our web framework.
Fast forward to 2013, and we’re starting to build the Gittip team in earnest. I announced a month ago that Gittip is hiring, and since then we’ve added over a dozen active contributors working on many different parts of Gittip. We’ve deployed important work from Joonas Bergius in refactoring the codebase under the hood, as well as smaller contributions from others, but we haven’t had a major user-facing contribution until now. I’m grateful to Nick Sergeant for stepping forward to convert Damon’s design into markup. I picked it up from there to integrate the markup with the site itself.
Refreshing the visual design of Gittip and recruiting contributors were two of five priorities I identified in October. Therefore, with this update, I’m satisfied that we’ve met those two goals. A third, Twitter integration, was finished in November. The two remaining goals from those five are non-U.S. payouts, and integrating with RubyGems.org. I look forward to announcements on those in the near future.
Chad Whitacre is the founder of Gittip, a platform for inspiring generosity through weekly cash gifts.