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Best online communities for software developers

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Re: Best online communities for software developers

#71

Post by bird_monster »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #69
bird_monster wrote: post #59

When 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 forge…

The human mind can only follow all the social interactions of a group of around 150 people -- give or take. That number likely varies a bit from one person to the other and some historical figures, like Napolean, were successful in part because they had an amazing memory for personal details of people around them. I was privy to the results of a good quality private study some years back when I was briefly the lead m…

I think HN and Reddit are closer to blogging/microblogging/RSS. Seeing what other people are saying about a topic. Maybe asking a question, maybe getting a response etc.

> Hacker News has done a good job of formalizing certain things and that keeps the signal-to-noise ratio high here even though the sense of community it once had when it was smaller is no longer something it seems to have.

Yeah, I think that this is essential to a successful forum but also brings up exactly what the issue is, I think. If you're optimizing for signal to noise, you're already beyond the scope of "community", in that you've already got too many people and too much content to ingest. Optimizing signal to noise on a forum is great with the microblog/RSS lens I apply, because it means I'm not seeing offtopic or irrelevant content in my feeds.

I also kinda think that a part of community (when thinking about community being defined as a group of people that are connected and feel involved in eachother's lives to varying extents) _is_ offtopic conversation. "How are you doing?" "How's your grandpa", etc. You can't allow this type of post/behavior on HN, because if you open those floodgates you're getting way too much noise to handle, but I also think that's why the shift has gone the way it's gone. You can't learn about eachother beyond subject matter that's attached to the topic of an individual post.

Re: Best online communities for software developers

#72

Post by davidwparker »

What's the best way to be involved in a community? For me, it's really a lack of time and/or focus.

Generally speaking, I spend the majority of my time actually working on my project. It's hard to get involved.

Even then, I'm on Hacker News (obviously) but don't take time to write out really great comments like patio11, etc. I'm also on Indie Hackers, but really only reply to threads based on suggestions I get from curated emails. Otherwise, I'm on quite a few subreddits, as well as a ton of discord and slack channels. I'm also on Twitter, but don't know how to really contribute there either.

I'm quite the generalist, and I'm really into Rails, Svelte, Flutter, Godot, and bootstrapping/indie projects.

How do you all find the time to be involved anywhere?

Re: Best online communities for software developers

#73

Post by jaxn »

m12k wrote: post #41

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.

For me, HN is the right amount of community as a bootstrapper/founder/etc. It is easy to spend too much time talking about it and less time just doing it.

Re: Best online communities for software developers

#75

Post by searchableguy »

vaylian wrote: post #42
elcapitan wrote: post #37

Earlier 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.

The design is a big deterrent to that. HN isn't remotely similar to any modern social media or forums.

Re: Best online communities for software developers

#76

Post by [deleted] »

bird_monster wrote: post #71
DoreenMichele wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The human mind can only follow all the social interactions of a group of around 150 people -- give or take. That number likely varies a bit from one person to the other and some historical figures, like Napolean, were successful in part because they had an amazing memory for personal details of people around them. I was privy to the results of a good quality private study some years back when I was briefly the lead m…

I think HN and Reddit are closer to blogging/microblogging/RSS. Seeing what other people are saying about a topic. Maybe asking a question, maybe getting a response etc. > Hacker News has done a good job of formalizing certain things and that keeps the signal-to-noise ratio high here even though the sense of community it once had when it was smaller is no longer something it seems to have. Yeah, I think that this is…

[deleted]

Re: Best online communities for software developers

#77

Post by viridian »

agumonkey wrote: post #56
viridian wrote: post #15

I 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

Mailing lists were a little after my time, by and large. I was subscribed to one for a now dead open source project called PCGen, and the thing mostly seemed to be inscrutable for a new, not-so-confident user.

Re: Best online communities for software developers

#78

Post by busrf »

ktkoffroth wrote: post #9

Any good communities (not on reddit) for Electrical/Computer Engineers? Things like HDL, Embedded, VLSI, General Electronics?

There’s a pretty good community associated with 1bitsquared, a vendor for a whole bunch of embedded/fpga hardware tools: https://1bitsquared.com/pages/community

Re: Best online communities for software developers

#80

Post by agumonkey »

viridian wrote: post #77
agumonkey wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Mailing lists were a little after my time, by and large. I was subscribed to one for a now dead open source project called PCGen, and the thing mostly seemed to be inscrutable for a new, not-so-confident user.

but that's the issue, the modern web is so easy and appealing, yet it goes nowhere it seems
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