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Comments on How should we approach a programming site or sites?
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How should we approach a programming site or sites?
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.
I've had some thoughts about this, which I'll try to coalesce into something resembling an answer. > Codidact is grow …
4y ago
Based on all the feedback here (and also on the related site proposals), I put forth this proposal: Create a single S …
4y ago
I don't know enough to have a full answer, but one differentiation that I think makes sense is for embedded systems prog …
4y ago
I want to offer a more community- and not topic-orientated answer to this question. Basically, you could rephrase the qu …
4y ago
Three problem is that a single supersite is a mess that is difficult to build anything other than a "codidact community" …
4y ago
I don't know about eventually, but while codidact is still getting started, it's better to not splinter communities. …
1y ago
Coming at this from a totally different perspective here. I think all of the above mention many great points but I can't …
4y ago
Lessons learnt from the past I've been at SO pretty much from the start. It is true that SO has sub-communities in a …
4y ago
This is less than a proposal: merely an idea. That's because I've not used SO much and don't know what works and what do …
4y ago
To answer the original question of how to approach programmer sites, I think a number of important features should be co …
4y ago
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To answer the original question of how to approach programmer sites, I think a number of important features should be considered.
- Making relevant versions of OS, programming languages, libraries, software and hardware visible;
- Having a way to tell whether the question/problem and the answers/solution apply to multiple (a range, multiple ranges or distinct) versions of each relevant OS, language, library. Let's say, in shape of a list of checkboxes of all the versions;
- Making it easy to add new versions and review older posts, update whether the question and answers are still relevant and work for newer versions.
These are direly needed on StackOverflow due to how old some of the questions and answers are.
Additionally, there needs to be a way to organize/group/link questions about the same, at the base of it, problem, but with slight differences between versions of relevant elements. Something like "Linked questions" widget on StackExchange.
Maybe with even tighter integration/consolidation of data. For example, adding a question variation to an existing question, with a brief description of what makes it different, so users could then browse the same core question, and pick between slight variations on the same page. This could turn the question into more of an all-purpose guide for solving the problem throughout all the versions of the software and OS combinations on one page instead of separate pages. Although it might make the page confusing and harder to navigate.
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