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This Programming Forum: What would you change?

Evil Phil

This forum has been rolling along happily for years now. I took it over from Talliesin and haven't made any huge changes really.

I think the Situations Vacant sticky has been a good idea and will keep it. But what I want to know is what changes would you make to improve the forum for you the user?

Language specific sub-forums have been suggested numerous times but I still don't think we've a large enough user base to warrant that so we'll stay generic at the moment. They'd just dilute what we have here. That being said it could happen in the future, and I'm hoping that this thread will start a move towards a big enough user base that it will.

A couple of changes I'd like to make: Change the forum name to something like Software Development as Programming doesn't really cover a lot of what we do. There was a discussion on the Forums forum about Programming and the Web Design and Development forum which I've just resurrected

A lot of the questions are from junior and trainee devs which I feel should be encouraged more but what will get you more seasoned developers interested? I guess that a move away from just asking for help with problems towards both asking help for problems and discussing development as a discipline would be a good start.

Just my €0.02, but what do you think?

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Trojan

I don't read Programming much these days, but I'm interested because I campaigned to have it created back in 2000 (it was also the first forum I moderated)

Initial thoughts... I agree on rename, maybe to "Software Development & Programming" would help folks who don't know what s/w dev is (but then they mightn't necessarily be the target audience of the board.

I agree that there doesn't appear to be enough traffic to create subforums for each language separately. There might be scope for lumping similar languages in together though, e.g. scripting and web related (php, perl, cgi, ruby, asp), "classic languages" (is there a proper name to describe these?) (C, C++, Pascal, Basic, maybe Java) and then Windows programming (.NET/VB, MFC etc)

oscarBravo

Just for the purposes of brainstorming, how would this work:

tech
 + software & applications
    + programming & development
    + open source

I've argued before for the creation of a "Software" forum, for those general software questions that people keep posting in Open Source, not knowing where else to put it (and not understanding what OSS is).

Anima

I don't really think theres enough traffic to warrant a sub-division of the forum. Maybe a bit of a name change.

NeverSayDie

I reckon the forum's pretty good as-is, nothing major springs to mind in terms of changes. I wouldn't recommend sub-dividing it, I think there's a decent level of traffic right now, without being swamped - diluting the forums would cut that down.

Some more stickies could be worth a try - maybe "recommended books", "recommended sites/resources", "tools for developers" a "dailywtf" style thread, etc.

Re the name change, no harm in it. Fairly technical point I guess, but it does mildly annoy me when folks treat "software development" and "programming" as the same thing; one's only a subset of the other, and it's a subset of several other fields too. You make a living as one, which involves doing some of the other, amongst a variety of other things. So yeah, I wouldn't mind seeing that change, might remind folks that there's a deal more to building software than programming it.

Webmonkey

Traffic is really low in this forum lately. Then again, college students will be arriving soon enough. Most questions are very basic however, maybe if there was a advanced sub forum it might attract professionals to asking questions a bit more advanced.

Tom Dunne

I don't know if there is any way to improve things. That would imply there was something broken.

One area I do think warrants a sub-forum is mobile development.

Both on the Apple Media Devices and the regular Mobiles/PDA forum, we have a lot of programmers developing apps. Forum request is here.

Makes most sense to have it over here, with a link from the Mobiles/PDA & Apple Media Devices forum.

(not a developer myself, just I am aware of the number of developers/developer related questions in my forums)

Ginger

If I could ask one change, it would be prefixing threads with a language for example so that us MS devs can easily avoid the non MS threads :P

I think the name change so that all elements of programming and web dev come here rather than having to check for ASP.NET queries in both this and the Web Dev & Design forum.

Possibly add a thread to relevant other forums such as Web Dev, IT Cert, Mobile Dev for example

I dont think there is enough traffic for sub dividing the forum (even tho I ihave asked for that in the past :;) )

Evil Phil

NeverSayDie wrote: »

Some more stickies could be worth a try - maybe "recommended books", "recommended sites/resources", "tools for developers" a "dailywtf" style thread, etc.

That's a good idea. How about this as a start?

Recommended Books
Developer tools and resources
Coding Horror
Latest Blogs

I also know a number of you keep blogs *looks at Ginger*. So as an experiment feel free to highlight new articles here, start a new thread if you like or post it to the Latest Blogs sticky. In fact do both for now, we'll try a bit of A/B testing to see which works better.

Call Me Jimmy

+1 on the dailywtf/coding horror thread. It can be a place to throw your latest frustration, even if it doesn't get an answer it'd be a nice place to vent a bit without starting a new thread.

I think a language prefix would be nice. Most people are only interested in one or two languages anyway. Other than that my only complaint is there aren't enough game developers but that isn't the forum's fault!

Evil Phil

Okay I've updated the forum charter asking people to prefix their threads with a language. Hopefully Cult will put a prefix dropdown into the posting page itself.

<update>
We now have [Question] and [Solved] prefixes :pac:

dazberry

There's a lot more to development that just writing code, I'd love to see a bit of focus on those other areas that might not be immediately evident, from source control thru' to build management, software PM, dealing with sh1t management, difficult customers, bad colleagues that no one will fire etc., sort of a PI from programmers outside the coding remit.

D.

Webmonkey

dazberry wrote: »

There's a lot more to development that just writing code, I'd love to see a bit of focus on those other areas that might not be immediately evident, from source control thru' to build management, software PM, dealing with sh1t management, difficult customers, bad colleagues that no one will fire etc., sort of a PI from programmers outside the coding remit.

D.

+1 - I'm going into the deep end with a big project now and put responsible for such things including software testing/enterprise management of s/w. Would love see more on this.

Sparks

Tom Dunne wrote: »

One area I do think warrants a sub-forum is mobile development.

Mobile specifically or embedded as well?

As to the forum, I like the new stickies (though the Coding Horror thread is going to give you *enormous* grief if it takes off). And I think they're the real solution because if Programming has a problem -- and I'm not saying it has -- then it's a content volume problem and not a structural problem.

The prefixes would be a nice touch though - but you'd have to decide on a specific theme for the prefixes, whether it be language (C/Java/ObjC/Perl/etc) or status (Question/Solved/etc) or platform (Mac/*nix/Win32/etc)...

And a big Feck Ya to dazberry's suggestion. Non-coding topics, and particularly stuff relating to the Irish programming scene would be welcome. Maybe try to get official reps from groups like ILUG, Php.ie, Ruby Ireland and so forth to post in here?

padraig_f

I'd make a sub-forum for all the questions where people are looking for help with their homework or work. Call it 'Code Assistance' or something. Most of these questions are very task-specific, low-level stuff that are of little general interest. A quick glance of the front page, there are a lot that could be moved in, e.g.

Help with DB query (MySQL)
Remove double from string and store in an array
Excel Help Formula???

And save the main forum for more higher-level, general discussion, that's relevant to a larger number of people, e.g.:

Need advice on PLC Comp Science courses
Which Revision Control System do you use?
Which language to learn?

I realise this would probably mean moving quite a lot of stuff to the sub-forum but I think would improve the signal-to-noise ratio. As it stands, having to wade through these kind of questions puts me off reading the forum more.

Earthhorse

Evil Phil wrote: »

A lot of the questions are from junior and trainee devs which I feel should be encouraged more but what will get you more seasoned developers interested? I guess that a move away from just asking for help with problems towards both asking help for problems and discussing development as a discipline would be a good start.

Evil Phil wrote: »

I also know a number of you keep blogs *looks at Ginger*. So as an experiment feel free to highlight new articles here, start a new thread if you like or post it to the Latest Blogs sticky. In fact do both for now, we'll try a bit of A/B testing to see which works better.

I haven't read the Programming forum in years but happened to see this thread in the New Announcements.

One suggestion which I would have is to have more seasoned developers talk about a project they've done. I don't mean a work project, which they'd probably be remiss talking about, but something they did off they're own bat at home. I don't even know if programmers write those kind of things but if they do then I'd be interested in reading what they have to say; how the idea came about, what problems they encountered in developing/deploying the solution, any interesting solutions they came up with, why they made the various decisions they did along the way.

Maybe that's not a realistic suggestion but it could operate like those "In The Well" threads you see on other forums and might hold the interest of both seasoned and junior developers (who can ask "stupid" questions about how the whole thing works). Just a suggestion anyway.

Evil Phil

The coding horror thread is an experiment, I'm aware of the overhead it could cause. If it gets out of hand then I'll drop it like a hot , face-eating tarantula.

I'm not going to split the forum out into sub-fora for the reasons already discussed. I too would love to see more about software development and not just coding specific threads, that's why I've requested a name change for the forum.

Sparks

Evil Phil wrote: »

If it gets out of hand then I'll drop it like a hot , face-eating tarantula.

Dude. You can't just drop a face-eating tarantula, they tend to adhere. That's the whole problem with face-eating things in general

amen

MS devs can easily avoid the non MS threads

personnaly I read all the posts. You never know you might learn something new from a non MS person

Ginger

It was more meant as tongue in cheek .. i read them all as well, never know when it might be something i have done somewhere else in my lifetime

Trojan

New name suggestion: "Software & Web Development"?

Evil Phil

I've already suggested that over on the Forums forum but to no avail. Perhaps we need to start a presure group? :P

Webmonkey

The website forum should be named Web Design only for things like HTML, CSS etc and here have Software and Web Programming or something for programming.

Civilian_Target

Nice thread, the new stickys are a good plan.

I agree with the sub-division, not along language lines, but basically along the lines of Learners and Professionals.
Learners can be best helped by people who want to help learners, and pro's can discuss more in-depth without being afraid of confusing people too much.

</2c>

Evil Phil

Webmonkey wrote: »

The website forum should be named Web Design only for things like HTML, CSS etc and here have Software and Web Programming or something for programming.

Yeah, I'm going to get in touch with the community managers today, if Aidan Walsh agrees, and see if we can get the change pushed through.

Evil Phil

The community managers are going to start work on restructuring the development forums in the next few days. :pac:

toiletduck

I was thinking about a sticky for programming interview questions? People could post up some of the ones they've encountered, others could tell what kind of position they're going for and posters could give a run down of what questions they would expect in that situation...

Martyr

would it be possible to get numbered lines if you were using the CODE/PHP tags?

so you can say "the code at line x needs to be changed to ..."

DonnieBrasco

a 'DATABASES' sub menu would be good