We have a suggestion for a site for professional coding, and software engineering and computer science also have some interest, and there are overlapping suggestions for cloud technologies and single-board microcontrollers. It seems likely that participants here have interests in other related areas too. How shall we approach this cluster of topics? Do we want one big tent -- a single programming site? Do we want a big tent and some specialized spin-offs -- what seems to have happened on SE? Do we want to plan for more focused communities from the start -- and, if so, what would they be?

I was an infrequent participant on SO; I have around 1200 rep after many years of passive, occasional posts. I don't have the right experience there to say with any certainty what worked well and what didn't. It appears to me that SO doesn't really have a community; it's too big for that. It might have sub-communities; I don't know how strong they are and how much they interact. And it might have had a community when it started; they're 11 years in now and things have changed. We'll be starting small; we are not operating at SO scale (yet). An advantage of a single site (or small number of clearly-differentiated sites) is that people know where to go; Balkanization where there are two-dozen different sites depending on which libraries or languages or tools you're using probably does not serve the programming community either.

I think a core diffentiator for Codidact is that we're putting community first from the beginning. We want to do what's best for the people participating here, whether that's one site or a handful or many (or one site and later spin-offs). We also have some tools they don't have over on SE, including categories and integrated blogs or wikis. And we're actively working on an open-source platform, so if it turns out there's something we need and don't have, we don't have to wait 6-8 years for somebody to consider the feature request.

It seems clear to me that there is interest in a place for questions about programming -- code, tools, design, and maybe processes. How shall we address that interest? What shall we build?

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We resolved this by creating Software Development with broad scope. There's even a Code Review category. If the community grows to a size that's hard to manage and subsets want to spin off later, we can do that.

posted over 4 years ago

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1y ago

Monica Cellio‭ staff

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