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Coding Communities - What Works?
drDugan asks: "There is a resurgence in interest lately in information-based systems and websites for data sharing, structured data, and enabling communities to work together better. I'm working a contract for a new business that is trying to build a community to support people who write software. What communities are you a part of now that help you write and develop software? I mean this question in a general way, including both online communities and offline interactions (your office, LUGs, etc.) -- where do you find connection with other people to get information, answers, and inspiration?"
"Sprinting" I find works really well. We just got back from PyCon, a 3 day conference with 4 days of sprinting afterwards. Sprinting is where people get together, either in person or via the IRC, to work on a particular task or set of tasks. Evelyn and I along with a group of a some other folks worked to get the new www.python.org site up. It had been in process for the better part of a year, but we were able to do a big push to get it ready to put up that 4 days and a few days afterwards, coordinated via IRC.
Linux Users Groups can tend to put people with good ideas together, and our local LUG tends to push people talking about their projects at the meetings. I've gotten a lot of good feedback from talking about my projects to the group. A good way to get peer review for a 1 person project.
The LUG meeting is once a month. The rest of the weeks of the month we have a Hacking Society meeting at the coffee shop. The idea is to set up a space where we can folks can work on various projects, everything from resolving bugs on Debian and Python projects, catching up on e-mail, working on software or talking about ideas and projects, installing different distros or getting software or hardware working.
We had our first Hacking Society meeting 5 years ago and had 3 other people at it. Since then, we've had over 100 different people at our local meeting, and regularly get a dozen people every week. Other chapters of Hacking Society have set up in 5 other locations around the world, but only one or two of them are really active. For those ones, it's really been working well. I'd be happy to help others set up local Hacking Societies, see http://www.hackingsociety.org/ for more information.
Just connecting with the community of people doing things is very powerful motivation and provides ideas to help get more work into it.
Things like wikis and SVN/CVS servers and bug tracking helps put software together. As long as it can foster the communities of people to get ideas shared and motivation going around. Things like IRC and mailing list can really help out with the ideas and peer review and motivation.
Sean
You might want to try [http://www.invisionpower.com/ an invision power board]. A [http://www.google.com/search?q=invision+power+boa rd&start=20 google search on the topic] reveals that many [[FLOSS]] projects use it to host their own community. There are of course [Category:Internet_forum_software|other alternatives] you might find interesting.
Just a semi off-topic thought, but a good place to start would be [[http://www.mediawiki.org/ MediaWiki's official homepage]...
It's not exactly a "community" in the "let's all chat" sense, but a community has sprung up on Code Snippets, a tagged 'del.icio.us for source code'.. most notably around Python coding on cellphones. But there's over a thousand users so something was bound to spring up.
I generally find usenet newsgroups are about the best source for programming questions.
I've often found that IRC is also very helpful. There are a number of good channels such as #C# and #C++ on DALnet and Freenode.
IRC can sometimes be hostile and is usually less professional than newsgroups. It also pays to know how to ask smart questions. A well-phrased and well-thought-out question that demonstrates you've already attempted to research the topic will get you much more helpful replies; otherwise you'll be in for a flamestorm of "RTFM!" and "STFW!".
Hmmm, Slash isn't linking my IRC URLs properly, but I'm sure you can find out how to log on through their websites: www.dal.net, www.freenode.org.
For my Java needs, I go to the Java Technology Forums http://forum.java.sun.com/index.jspa For any MS or SQL needs, I go to Tek-Tips http://www.tek-tips.com/ Both are free, and if you ask questions intelligibly, you'll get answers very quickly.
No kidding, some other people's source in comparision sometimes feels like a child's homework essay next to a master's printed novel.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The Developer Shed Network[1] is a whole slew of sites and forums run by the same people (Jon Caputo and others). They have a lot of nice tutorials/articles, as well as various forums such as ASP Free[2], which is dedicated to Microsoft-ish technologies; and Dev Shed[3], which is geared more towards free and open-source technologies such as Apache, Linux/*BSD, XML, C/C++, MySQL/PostgreSQL/Firebird, PHP/Python/Perl/et al.
Trust me on this last one. I'm a moderator on many of the forums there and the people are always very helpful, polite, and (in most cases) respond to threads rather quickly.
[1] http://www.developershed.com/
[2] http://forums.aspfree.com/
[3] http://forums.devshed.com/
It's probably CodeProject. Beginner to very advanced projects alike, usually with relaxed licenses as well. You can find gold nuggets like the best tutorial I know for the lightweight Windows Template Library, along with a free vastly improved memory leak detector there. They also supports plenty of languages for Windows development, with a big share of articles and code on C++. A message board is added for each code project listed where you can discuss them, along with project unrelated forums for general coding discussion.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!