Best social network/forum for a beginner self-taught developer? | Hacker News Reader

Best social network/forum for a beginner self-taught developer?

5 pointsantoperezmed7 comments

Hi, I am medical student who recently discovered programming and I am learning on my own (I can see cool uses of these skills in the medical field). The thing is I would like to find a community of tech people (some social network/forum/whatever) where I can ask questions, recommendations, advice, etc. Or just share my progress. X (Twitter) is the closest thing I know, as there is a lot of tech people there, but it doesn't seem quiet the place I am searching for.

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If you just want to chat with other devs about tech stuff, this is as good a place as any.

But if you specifically need programming help and advice, honestly the chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude are more helpful than most programmers. They're trained on all the open source code and Stackoverflow answers, etc., and can easily help you debug any beginner issue.

The quality of the community seem to depends on the level of effort each member has to put into formulating their input.

X, Reddit etc are low effort.

I evaluated X for similar purpose. It felt useful but really wasn't to me. X has the "building in public", but it generally stimulates clickbailt style interaction, and strong focus on irrelevant details because colorful things draw attention more than deeper things. It easily becomes a distraction because of the dopamine centered habits developed.

I suggest GitHub. Upload your projects, however small. It's often good learning experience to iterate over old projects and improve, rather than forgetting code deep in some folder structure later lost in data migration. Engage with projects you like, by participating in their discussion page and more.

ChatGPT etc in my experience is superior to broad style community interaction.

Ask your friends about discords they are in. That is where everybody I know is sort of moving towards.

irc can be good (libera chat) - it's a shadow of its former self, but some languages still have fairly active and intelligent channels.

Well, as strange as it sounds: GitHub, Element. IRC and 4chan. Yes, there is a lot of harassment and trolling in those spaces. However, they are inhabited by quite skilled devs. Think of it as a powerfull witch living in a swamp... Refrain from Discords, they are usually doubble the drama with half the iq points... Same goes for Reddit...

The subreddit of the language or framework you're trying to learn.

Subreddits are a strange place. I feel like they're below average IQ but have some kind of cargo cult going around that they seem to speak the same language without understanding it.

Every now and then someone will make some post about "Tech A is overrated" and they'll make some good points, but because almost nobody in the whole subreddit understands Tech A, there's no proper discussion going on.

Not all of them and the new ones can be pretty good. But I feel like beds there's no real community and such, there will be a bunch of smart people going in and out leaving traces for the natives before they disappear.

tldr: there's a lot of advanced beginners but be careful not to get trapped there

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