Best online communities for software developers(thehiveindex.com)
thehiveindex.com
Best online communities for software developers
https://thehiveindex.com/topics/software-development/
85 comments
I thought everyone was using dev.to these days?
I used it for a while, it seems that most content is geared towards beginners (ie. to-do list web apps). There is a lot of noise and I failed to find really interesting / in-depth articles.
They do a great job at building communities though.
They do a great job at building communities though.
From what I've seen it has very little value if you aren't into trendy web dev or mobile apps. + the dark patterns soured me on it (although they've gotten rid of at least the worst ones)
I used to use dev.to a lot, they definitely do great community building, at least as of a couple of years ago. Aren't they more aimed towards beginners?
Yeah. They have some settings to set what type of articles/posts you see, but it's very beginner web-dev centric. I stopped going there awhile ago because I wasn't finding anything there for me. IMO it's a very, very good replacement for Medium as a blogging/long-form writing platform, but content discoverability is lacking.
dev.to is new medium.com
Yes, agree with that. It was nice at the beginning, like most of this kind communities. But with popularity and lack of moderation comes huge amount of low-effort content from beginners to beginners and PR pieces by corporates.
In the last few months there’s even steady amount of posts with “Come and see my YouTube” kind of approach, which is tragic. :/
In the last few months there’s even steady amount of posts with “Come and see my YouTube” kind of approach, which is tragic. :/
Soon you will be able to read three articles for free each month, more if you register. Anyway here's a list of free icon sets you can use in your projects. Tomorrow I will post 15 best free fonts you could use. Cheers.
+1. It is not on the list and they are doing a great job in terms of community building.
I expected to see IRC communities as well.
Is there a collection of communities that aren't hosted by corporations?
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. :)
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. :)
There's plenty of interesting places on IRC, mailing list, XMPP, Mastodon.
Downvote me to hell, but best communities I hang out in are far from shiny/hip/popular, and this is why they are good.
Downvote me to hell, but best communities I hang out in are far from shiny/hip/popular, and this is why they are good.
Agree, and on Matrix as well.
I've been looking on Mastadon, and not finding that much. Especially compared to Twitter. Might just be where I'm looking though.
I don’t know if you consider freenode to be “hosted by corporations” but if you don’t, the channels dedicated to both specific libraries and the languages themselves are at least active, last I checked.
The one downside I’d point out is that language channels tend to be filled with purists, of the, “ you shouldn’t want to do that” variety.
The one downside I’d point out is that language channels tend to be filled with purists, of the, “ you shouldn’t want to do that” variety.
Just wondering, what is that community for startup stories? Dark blue in theme.
IndieHackers? https://www.indiehackers.com
Any good communities (not on reddit) for Electrical/Computer Engineers? Things like HDL, Embedded, VLSI, General Electronics?
https://electronics.stackexchange.com/ is pretty decent
Part of that community has done a migration to https://electrical.codidact.com - it doesn't have as much activity or visibility as StackExchange... but its there.
You can try https://www.edaboard.com/
> EDAboard.com is an international Electronic Discussion Forum focused on EDA software, circuits, schematics, books, theory, papers, asic, pld, 8051, DSP, Network, RF, Analog Design, PCB, Service Manuals... and a whole lot more!
> EDAboard.com is an international Electronic Discussion Forum focused on EDA software, circuits, schematics, books, theory, papers, asic, pld, 8051, DSP, Network, RF, Analog Design, PCB, Service Manuals... and a whole lot more!
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
4programmers.net if you speak Polish.
http://ebanoe.it for russian speaking folks
In the foreign language vein, are there any for those who speak German?
I'd be interested, too, but I think Germans will always try to adapt to English speaking folks, so I guess no?
Its not directly a community, but the german ubuntuusers wiki [1] has very high quality content whenever it pops up in my search results
[1] https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Startseite/
[1] https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Startseite/
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 found a great answer for the question of community these days, outside of checking in on the blogs and newsletters of various developers. I'll have to check Code Project out though.
I haven't found a great answer for the question of community these days, outside of checking in on the blogs and newsletters of various developers. I'll have to check Code Project out though.
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, but extremely slow, for insightful posts as well.
I like /r/coding but it's pretty dead and sometimes /r/scala will have decent blog posts. Also /r/hnblogs is very decent, but extremely slow, for insightful posts as well.
r/rust appears to be a decent community; lots of very good posts.
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.
/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.
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as one of those /r/reactjs mods, very happy to hear that we're doing reasonably well! :)
/r/programminglanguages has good content. Most of the contributors are hobbyists, and some are just starting out, but there are always good discussions to be had.
Seconded. It may not be the content you want, depending on what you're looking for, but there is a lot of great, informative content on that sub.
The reason I have a reddit account in the first place is /r/rust. It was and still is one of the central discussion places of the community, more so today now that IRC has been killed. /r/linux is a great place to hang out as well, at least if you are interested in FLOSS related things. Sometimes you'll even see someone like gregkh chime in.
I remember at one point the moderators turned r/linux into a place where you could only post Linux news. That's when I left the subreddit, and I haven't really gone back since.
I think /r/musictheory is good
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.
Same goes for comments, bad comments get downvoted and greyed out quickly, whereas great comments get elevated.
The design is a big deterrent to that. HN isn't remotely similar to any modern social media or forums.
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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
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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https://www.thefoli.com for data/AI devs
Shameless plug: I run getmakerlog.com, it’s a fantastic community for developers and creators.
I guess newsgroups are out of the question...
For a long time I've felt there are a plethora of communities for frontend development, but little for backend development. Any recommendations on backend-oriented communities?
I'm sceptical that there are many (any?) decent "communities" for coders anymore; particularly since the rise of StackOverflow and it's sibling forums.
It used to be the case that niche techs and business domains could provide a rallying point for those heavily-involved where you would see familiar names and could even get to know them a bit.
In the age of million-member fora with much wider scope like the above, that's just not something that is as easy; communities are more difficult to form around a tag.
It used to be the case that niche techs and business domains could provide a rallying point for those heavily-involved where you would see familiar names and could even get to know them a bit.
In the age of million-member fora with much wider scope like the above, that's just not something that is as easy; communities are more difficult to form around a tag.
There are still tight-knit communities on Freenode IRC and Reddit. For example #lisp, #emacs, ##math, r/lisp, r/emacs, and r/math have great communities with friendly attitude.
Stack Overflow operates at a much larger scale and compared to Stack Overflow, these communities are definitely much smaller but I see that as an advantage. The quality of discussions is often pretty good. Off-topic friendly banter occurs once in a while when the channels are quiet. With a good percentage of the members composed of regulars in these channels, they are still able to maintain a sense of community.
Stack Overflow operates at a much larger scale and compared to Stack Overflow, these communities are definitely much smaller but I see that as an advantage. The quality of discussions is often pretty good. Off-topic friendly banter occurs once in a while when the channels are quiet. With a good percentage of the members composed of regulars in these channels, they are still able to maintain a sense of community.
I haven't bothered to seek out an invite, but I do like https://lobste.rs
Tbh it's not that difficult, just hop in the IRC channel and ask for it
No lobste.rs mention? In the article or these comments as of now.
And Github is missing? How can I take this list seriously? There’s a lot of golden nuggets when you dig through github. You also get immediate credibility checks.
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.
Bootstrapped.fm community at https://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/
Seconded. I miss technical conversations with colleagues, and while I have my ex-colleagues chat, nothing really replaces the Slack with other engineers at your company.
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?
There are a few other sister sites, shown here https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/wiki
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.
Surprised to see codeproject so popular without me knowing about it :)
No mention of IRC? There's still dedicated channels for many-a-thing on Freenode and others.
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 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.
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.
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 moderator for, iirc, the oldest community on a particular topic on the internet. The study was done internally by the very talented founder.
They found that 20 percent of members were active and regular users, 10 percent posted once or only occasionally, and the rest lurked.
Twenty percent is one fifth. If you multiply 150 by 5, you get 750. It has been my observation that when small online communities hit 750 members, they start having issues and needing to differentiate and/or formalize, which fits neatly with the above two piece of data.
The way humans deal with larger groups than that is formalization. Having formal customs and what not so you don't really need to personally know an individual to have a recipe for how to successfully interact with them is how people cope with having to interact with people they will never know well.
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.
A subreddit can become a community, but you would need to keep it small. It might also help to make it private.
I hypothesize that you could foster more of a sense of community for HN by expanding the leader board to 150 names.
I was privy to the results of a good quality private study some years back when I was briefly the lead moderator for, iirc, the oldest community on a particular topic on the internet. The study was done internally by the very talented founder.
They found that 20 percent of members were active and regular users, 10 percent posted once or only occasionally, and the rest lurked.
Twenty percent is one fifth. If you multiply 150 by 5, you get 750. It has been my observation that when small online communities hit 750 members, they start having issues and needing to differentiate and/or formalize, which fits neatly with the above two piece of data.
The way humans deal with larger groups than that is formalization. Having formal customs and what not so you don't really need to personally know an individual to have a recipe for how to successfully interact with them is how people cope with having to interact with people they will never know well.
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.
A subreddit can become a community, but you would need to keep it small. It might also help to make it private.
I hypothesize that you could foster more of a sense of community for HN by expanding the leader board to 150 names.
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.
> 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.
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Mmmmnah, not buying this list. I've had some first hand experience with some of the groups/organizations on that list and they are something to stay the hell away from.
Telegram is surprisingly good. My entry point to the Telegram rabbit hole was the Android development community, and I've found quite a few people who are willing to discuss stuff. We also have a lot of fun.
I've been using telegram for a while and only now found out that there are good communities on it. Which ones do you recommend? How does one get invited?
To add to what others have mentioned, it seems the kinds of closer communities people want are also local.
For South Africans, try zatech.co.za :)
For South Africans, try zatech.co.za :)
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?
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?
Discord: csharp
Irc
Some gitter channels
Irc
Some gitter channels
I had a look at Code Project but looking at their Articles dropdown, I couldn't find much related to security (Disclaimer: I'm quite biased towards security to begin with). I find this odd given the avalanche of problems being discovered on a constant basis.
The section that I did find ("Security and Cryptography" in "General Programming") seemed more geared towards crypto - there was even a subsection for Steganography (?!). I actually think this is a bit concerning given that C++ is one of the most discussed languages on the platform...
EDIT: There is actually a Web Security section, but none for desktop development (or any other section, including development lifecycle)
The section that I did find ("Security and Cryptography" in "General Programming") seemed more geared towards crypto - there was even a subsection for Steganography (?!). I actually think this is a bit concerning given that C++ is one of the most discussed languages on the platform...
EDIT: There is actually a Web Security section, but none for desktop development (or any other section, including development lifecycle)