Any communities for bootstrappers? I know indiehackers.com already, but I'm missing something more communal, e.g. on Slack, Discord or a FB group. Especially as a solo-founder, it'd be nice to have more of a community to share experiences with.
Best online communities for software developers
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Re: Best online communities for software developers
#52Any communities for bootstrappers? I know indiehackers.com already, but I'm missing something more communal, e.g. on Slack, Discord or a FB group. Especially as a solo-founder, it'd be nice to have more of a community to share experiences with.
Re: Best online communities for software developers
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you mind sharing what the exception communities are? I've found some really insightful comments in /r/javascript from the creators of selenium for example; but the noise to signal is very low as you mentioned. /r/reactjs is another decent community as the maintainers do post in the comments. I like /r/coding but it's pretty dead and sometimes /r/scala will have decent blog posts. Also /r/hnblogs is very decent,…
On the ops side, /r/selfhosted and /r/homelab often come up in searches with pretty good content. /r/aws is also okay, but there's obviously also a lot of certification and amazon event noise. On the dev side, /r/reactjs as you mentioned is pretty good, and I can't really speak to any other languages right now, since I've been full stack js for over a year now, and /r/node and /r/javascript are not so good.
I believe it has to do with the specificity of the forum, passion of the people contributing, activity of the mods to keep it "on topic."
/r/homelab (I've dipped my toes into occasionally) has people who are passionate about their craft. The people who are interested in setting up a homelab are also likewise interested in investing (time and money) in it.
This differs from things like /r/learnprogramming where the people posting are not invested in it (the community or the craft).
Another difference would be the "who contributes new posts" aspect. With /r/homelab new posts come from people of all skill levels. With /r/learnprogramming they come from people who are at the very basic skill level.
The implications of this is that /r/homelab has peers helping peers while /r/learnprogramming needs people who aren't posting questions to post comments and provide additional material.
Re: Best online communities for software developers
#54I expected to see IRC communities as well. Is there a collection of communities that aren't hosted by corporations?
I have been using IRC for for 14 years now. I began with DALnet, EFnet, Freenode, OFTC, etc. These days, I just use Freenode only because all the main communities around open source technologies seem to hang out there.
Before StackOverflow was founded and became a thing, Freenode IRC was my primary source of help when I encountered issues in open source tools. I have learnt a lot from the #debian, ##math, and #not-math channels, especially.
Some of my favourite channels on Freenode IRC include #lisp, #emacs, and #python. They have great communities with many regulars who have great attitude. These channels are also quite friendly to beginners. I still remember an interesting incident from 2006 when I posted a mathematics question to one of the channels. The channel was mostly quiet. After about 15 minutes, I got detailed answers from multiple members of the channel. 20 minutes or so later, I saw others posting Python questions to the same channel. That is when I realized that I had inadvertently posted a mathematics question in the #python channel. :)
Re: Best online communities for software developers
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the general rule for reddit is: the more specific the subreddit, the less noise and the better the conversations, not just with tech, but most of them. Once you have people who actually care about something specific, they will maintain the quality of their discourse.
I agree with that observation when it comes to reddit. But it makes me wonder why HN still contains a high signal to noise ratio despite not having subforums.
I'm just guessing, could it be that it's the top vs new categories? It's difficult to leave the "new" section without interesting and relevant content. If you check the new section, it's full of duplicates, spam, self-promo or otherwise uninteresting submissions with zero comments.
Same goes for comments, bad comments get downvoted and greyed out quickly, whereas great comments get elevated.
Re: Best online communities for software developers
#56I don't think reddit is a good use of a programmer's time these days if you are seeking community. There are a few exceptional subreddits, but /r/programming, /r/learnprogramming, /r/webdev, and /r/compsci all have a low signal:noise ratio because all of them are majority undergrads or professionals who have under a year in the field. As other people have noted in this thread, dev.to has the same problem. I haven't f…
Who else here thinks that good old mailing lists are better ? Higher density of thoughts, actual work, slower pace.
It's just a thought, I rarely use them but compared to most of the web it seems like a saner substrate
Re: Best online communities for software developers
#57I don't think reddit is a good use of a programmer's time these days if you are seeking community. There are a few exceptional subreddits, but /r/programming, /r/learnprogramming, /r/webdev, and /r/compsci all have a low signal:noise ratio because all of them are majority undergrads or professionals who have under a year in the field. As other people have noted in this thread, dev.to has the same problem. I haven't f…
Would you mind sharing what the exception communities are? I've found some really insightful comments in /r/javascript from the creators of selenium for example; but the noise to signal is very low as you mentioned. /r/reactjs is another decent community as the maintainers do post in the comments. I like /r/coding but it's pretty dead and sometimes /r/scala will have decent blog posts. Also /r/hnblogs is very decent,…
I think /r/musictheory is good
Re: Best online communities for software developers
#58I don't think reddit is a good use of a programmer's time these days if you are seeking community. There are a few exceptional subreddits, but /r/programming, /r/learnprogramming, /r/webdev, and /r/compsci all have a low signal:noise ratio because all of them are majority undergrads or professionals who have under a year in the field. As other people have noted in this thread, dev.to has the same problem. I haven't f…
You might like /r/ProgrammingLanguages. It's a specific subset of programmers who are interested in programming language design and theory, but they seem more advanced. It's not very active though
Re: Best online communities for software developers
#59When I hear community, I generally think there's some kind of connection or interraction setting a group a part from something like "a set of people that walked into a building at the same time." I don't really think of HN, Reddit, any generalized "forum" type website as a community, in that most of the people never get to know eachother, or worse, never even really try.
Most of the content is closer to set and forget, or set and debate. If you think of your _actual_ living communities, you might know your neighbor, and you might communicate with them about things when you see them. You might feel fondly towards them (of course, you might not). With these online forums, that doesn't really happen (ignoring celebrity accounts). It seems rare to remember someone's username and/or communicate with them frequently or outside of the forum itself.
I think if you are seeking community as I described above, HN and Reddit are fundamentally not about that thing. Maybe I'm in the minority, or maybe that's not how other people think, but it's definitely how I've used and seen others use Reddit/HN over the past decade.
Re: Best online communities for software developers
#60Any communities for bootstrappers? I know indiehackers.com already, but I'm missing something more communal, e.g. on Slack, Discord or a FB group. Especially as a solo-founder, it'd be nice to have more of a community to share experiences with.
https://barnacl.es/
That's interesting, they are using the same engine as lobste.rs. Are the same people behind the two sites? Are there other sites that use the lobste.rs project with a real user base?