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Welcome to Codidact Meta!

Codidact Meta is the meta-discussion site for the Codidact community network and the Codidact software. Whether you have bug reports or feature requests, support questions or rule discussions that touch the whole network – this is the site for you.

Comments on How should we approach a programming site or sites?

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How should we approach a programming site or sites?

+25
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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?

--

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.

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General comments (4 comments)
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+1
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Coming at this from a totally different perspective here. I think all of the above mention many great points but I can't help but feel that we will find more success in the community by offering something totally different than SO.

It needs to be broad enough that we can gather a large community without being so broad questions are all over the place.

A couple ideas:

  • Career advice QandA. Something totally different and you might love it or hate it but there'd be a huge market for it.

  • IDE QandA

  • A larger language tag like JavaScript or something where the community is big and we could try to offer something a bit more focused and unique. Maybe even something like advanced JS or functional JS or something like that.

  • As previously mentioned, a professional coding site is another great idea

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General comments (2 comments)
General comments
Lundin‭ wrote over 4 years ago

I think the "Software engineering" site needs to be broad and tolerant as suggested here: https://meta.codidact.com/questions/74893#answer-276171. Not necessarily career advise and fuzzy "story of my life" discussions however. Perhaps a different site for that, similar to SE "The Workplace" but programmer-oriented? One could perhaps place career stuff + project management + workplace issues under one site? ("The Workspace"? :) )

Monica Cellio‭ wrote over 4 years ago

If we build a general software-development site, I think having a careers category there would enhance it. It'd be software-specific, not like Workplace.SE, but Workplace.SE was pretty software-heavy and certainly assumed office jobs (as compared to, say, plumbers or teachers, which were supposed to be in scope too). So maybe the jobs questions belong with the topic and not on a general site -- worth a try!