Ask HN: What community do you ask dev questions to? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What community do you ask dev questions to?

13 pointssackfield20 comments

Recently I asked a question on Stack Overflow and it was closed due to it being opinion based. This isn't entirely wrong, I wanted to know how people were approaching a problem and the answer may depend on subjective factors. However it struck me that at this stage of my knowledge most things are opinion and not a matter of fact (more art than science), so Stack Overflow just doesn't serve my needs anymore.

In the wake of this, I wondered what forums/places people use to ask other people about development/architecture/coding questions and to solicit advice from other developers.

The obvious answers to this seem to have some headwinds: Twitter seems good only if you have a minimum viable amount of followers, and HN always seemed more geared towards news than advice.

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It depends on your question, but softwareengineering.stackexchange.com might fit for some of them?

Seconded. There are a lot of great communities on Stack Exchange, beyond Stack Overflow. I pretty much ask a lot of "stupid" question on Cross-Validated all the time.

Stack Overflow has one of the worst communities I know of, if you can even call it a community, but the Stack Exchange ones are amazing.

I'll point out that IRC is still a thing and that there are some very helpful master programmers hanging out there.

Anybody know a good IRC client for MacOS?

I can wholeheartedly recommend a terminal IRC client (e.g. irssi) in a screen session running on a VPS.

Why on a VPS? Some reason related to security?

Always-on, never offline, can just "scroll up" from anywhere.

As the sibling comment says: my VPS is always on, and I can SSH into it from any of my machines, reattach to the screen session, and talk under the same nickname. Besides this, I'm never offline (barring things like netsplits). I'm not doing it for security reasons, although it does provide a level of indirection if your goal is to not expose your home IP address to everyone (getting a cloak is also useful when it comes to this).

Thanks.

If you count web, irccloud.com is excellent. I wish everyone would have just used IRCCloud instead of Discord or some other walled garden.

I second this. IRCCloud’s UI is very nice.

On Mastodon, using #hashtags, I don't get a lot of activity on my dev type questions, but I get quality activity which suits me even better.

I imagine some languages garner more action than others, but I'm not immune to getting stuck in Python or Lisp, and getting really good replies (and occasionally a full debated thread when there are competing methods with pros and cons.) I find showing at least a vague idea of what you've tried goes a long ways there.

Mastodon being the way it is, doesn't work well for searching out those answers since a lot of people delete their posts automagically after a time, so you probably have to hope your question isn't one they've already answered a dozen times recently.

Many OSS projects have a dedicated Discord server these days. I've had some success getting help in those vs asking the same think of StackOverflow or on Github.

Reddit is pretty good too IMO. When I first started coding, Reddit people would be super helpful to me

Did you try Software Engineering Stack Exchange? Might be worth a try.

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/

Aren't they similarly hostile to opinions?

Not sure, but I think they are less hostile in that regard.

Twitter is probably the best, otherwise something like Taro, or bringing on a technical advisor for your startup

I rarely ask, between stack overflows answered questions, AI and searches most of it is there! But if I had to ask: SO or Reddit

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