* The Usenet has become utterly irrelevant
* Equally web forums
* StackOverflow has archival value but for the rest it is a wide desert of 0-answer questions
* In my current case (an Android issue) even Google's own forum (https://groups.google.com/g/android-developers) appears to be only a honeypot to train their spam protection :)
So is there a place to turn to these days when someone is hitting a roadblock with a specific development issue or have they completely disappeared?
Thanks
People don't often take the time to do detailed write-ups while investigating, but when they do... amazing. Fountains of knowledge hidden in closed issues.
Speaking of which - especially in the ops / systems side of things - if you're stuck on an issue, and you've got a gut feeling some repo will be a good source of truth for that issue, search for keywords in the open AND THE CLOSED issues of that repo. So. Much. Stuff.
I really gave StackOverflow a try, and I have no intention of writing an answer ever again. I took 30 minutes to write a very detailed answer to a question, only to find out that the question has been deleted days later.
Looking at similar questions, there are 40k+ unanswered questions, mostly very low quality and from users with almost no "karma".
Why bother answering, when answers must be accepted by the poster and poster does not even know they should accept an answer in the end?
StackOverflow needs overhaul, but at its current size, we're better off starting something new.
Discord is where everyone is, but it's so awful just trying to ask a question I almost never get anything out of it. You ask a question and people talk over you and ignore it because it's too "hard".
The only community on Discord I've found that's actually helpful is the Rust server. I love Rust.
"The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."
Armed with this ultimate weapon, you can use any resource that is likely to have knowledgeable programmers orbiting it.
There are a lot of valid complaints and good suggestions about SO here but those are probably better taken to the SO meta stack where they can be turned into change.
I still find many relevant answers there. Maybe you're mistaking the irrelevance of whatever you're searching for as the relevance of SO. Having said that, "advice" lends itself to discussion and opinion. SO is quite plain about it not being a platform for discussion; it's for Q and A.
Being able to ask or answer more or less anonymously without the points/gamification thing is liberating for me! And of course I feel better that I have stopped feeding the walled gardens line slack and friends.
Now with the help of services like irccloud or even just by using a web client you don't have any excuses to not use IRC. Just try it and thank me later; I'm serafeim on freenode :)
Awful searching experience, gated, so many problems. But that's where the people are. I only hope Matrix can improve their UX and encourage at least some people to migrate there instead
The other day I gave a very detailed question on StackOverflow about solving a specific problem in computer vision. I have little experience in CV, but wanted to know from experts into what I should look into or how they would tackle this problem / find other edge cases I were missing etc. My question got deleted since I wasn't able to provide any code, but more of a "This is how I imagine it to do" and that was not a coding question. I tried reddit, but there was no real activity.
I thought you were exaggerating, but dear Lord, it's really full of spam (yes, Google themselves say that "Posts about job openings or from recruiters are considered spam."). Just a single legitimate question, which seems more general support than a technical question by a developer.
I think one issue is that like stack overflow any site for this would be heavily abused by beginners and people with poor communication skills who can't describe their problems well, effectively burying the interesting conversations under mountains of unintelligible rambling.
If you frequently get 0 answers, work on the quality of the question - clear, short, include clear code snippets.
The second place-for me-was a Discord group. Since the pandemic the local Python Meetup (Meetup is another resource) group started having its weekly project meeting on Discord. And funny thing happened, there are participants from all across the Eastern US—don’t have to be ‘local’ on Discord.
Recall from years ago (Usenet era) some groups would say you could find them on IRC. I think Discord scratches that itch today.
Discord/IRC is its own beast— a dynamic social experience.
IMHO, for the ask-and-wait the only non-owner forum is STackExchange. I naively divide the successful items at SE as either succinct and simple Google search questions where no answer is on the web, or which enough people create good answers before the mods clamp down (give the mob what they want).
Or, the questions have to reflect deep-knowledge in an active and engaged community. You can call it _what’s hot_ moderated by little Neros or what I’ve started to call the Mod-Walled Garden of moderated SE sub-groups.
These days all the simple questions seem to have been asked before—everything is a duplicate. SE worked because people wanted to take the time to demonstrate their knowledge and get get community kudos for when they were clever or succinct, right? Now it seems the _ground is saturated_. Where are the most engaged and interested parties? For me, a weekend programmer/forever ‘newbie’, it’s in the channels I mentioned.
Remember that word, ‘newbie’? A friend who introduced me to Usenet gave me the instructions that I had to use this term in my question for the social signaling that I knew I was an idiot, and to please go easy on me! Haha
If you are looking for interaction with humans - Stack Overfow, Reddit, Hacker News. The probability of anyone responding is rather low unfortunately.
Personally I crawl through the web - public repositories on github and gitlab, websites from the SO family, websites of universities, etc. I search through my local library of books. Obtaining an advice from a skillful human is very difficult.
Also understand the kind of instrumentation and code introspection and navigation tools your platform has.
Look into the monitoring solutions, maybe tracers, syscalls, etc.
Be open to changing your build flow, deployment, and testing methods.
The primary source is the computer. Everything else is secondary.
People rely on the internet too much. If you're stumped try solving it without surfing the internet at all. Use traditional toolling.
When SwiftUI came out I learnt it by trying out each question about it. This way it was easy to get an introduction, because all were new to the technology and so were interested in figuring the questions out. And the questions were simple enough because no one had much of a grasp.
With old technology you do not necessarily have enthusiasts who try to "figure it out too" at the moment and so it gets more difficult.
I don’t think much have changed though. The good answers on the internet have almost always been drowned out by the bad ones. I get that google programming is a thing, but it really shouldn’t be.
I don't necessarily see this as a negative thing, however. It's bad in the sense that sometimes I can't find a quick answer when I just want to copy paste a solution. On the other hand, I found that it has forced me to read multiple different solutions/opinions (often including source code), which deepens my knowledge on the topic and puts me in a better position to make an educated decision.
Sure, it'd be nice to have the perfect answer just slapped in your face. But nothing beats the feeling of finally getting something to work, but also understanding why exactly it works in the first place.
Take your time to describe the problem, and be patient waiting for a response.
Developer focused slack and discord groups are another great option.
Joe Armstrong, Odersky, Stroustrup ("a tour" and "principles and practice", both latest editions, are finally good reads), the Go book by Kernighan is a decent one, etc.
Avoid blogs, shitty books by amateurs who are learning while writing (everything by Pact, lol) and other fast food.
Avoid everything related to Java or JavaScript - poorly designed crap, and focus on Scala, Haskell, Erlang, Go and Rust - attempts to fix the fucking mess we are in.