Ask HN: small projects to network with other programmers

Real world meetups for joint hacking are better than online collaboration. If the goal is to learn from other programmers, you learn a lot more by sitting next to them. A lot of it is incidental stuff you would not have thought to ask, like tricks in vi and emacs and etc. Another reason to work with someone is it provides a kind of social discipline, you feel you have to get something done on the project on a semi-regular basis. A weekly hacking session at a coffeehouse or someones apartment provides that regular discipline, and because the hacking sessions inevitably end, physical meetings can keep a side project from growing and taking over the rest of your life.

The "just work on a open-source project" advice isn't that bad, but you should pick something that you would benefit from improving. It is still a good idea to solict others to help you in a physical meeting, however. Find people who would benefit from improvement in the same project.

I think rather than a website or webapp, what you are looking for is a computer club. I go to a weekly meeting in Austin of ALE, a linux users group. We meet 7 pm to 11:30 pm, and we are an "experimental" group, in that we never have presentations or a planned agenda -- people bring computers with problems and we fix them, new people show up asking for help learning linux, etc. There are about 5 people there who come regularly with programming issues, ranging from side-business startup sites that are in php and mysql to hobbiest robots.

If you are really serious about this, find a place (possibly your house or apartment) and have a "Saturday afternoon hack-a-thon" every week or every other week. If you provide food and coffee people will come. Your main problem is likely to be keeping non-programmers from showing up and just talking.

If you have trouble finding a place to do this, see if you can locate a co-working or "jelly" type place in your area. A co-working place might let you use the area during non-business hour such as on weekends, and the jelly people probably know all the good coffeehouses.

The reason I was thinking of online projects has to do with having critical mass for a given technology (say Django) in a given place (say Montreal, where I'm located). In Montreal, for example, Rails seems to enjoy more popularity, and Django seems more isolated (just a feeling). So if I was to organize Django-themed meetups, the circle would be limited (again I'm not sure, but just to illustrate).

You could say I'm being picky here, but why not use the power of the Web which is a known solution for such situations? And btw real-world meetups often happen after online ones.

I don't have anything against real-world meetups, but I just came back from one, and there were presentations, but only a single project and you worked with people you already knew, mostly. So I didn't end up meeting much people, as chatting without a goal in mind isn't, err, my greatest strength. I'd really like something much more goal-oriented. The Six hour startup formula is really good, in that sense.

Thanks for the suggestions, though. I have heard of Free Hacker meetups in my area, for example, and I really should try showing up at one. Yet I think the goal is a bit different.

(Looking back on this, mentioning Rails seems to not make any sense, but the reason is deep in my fuzzy subconscious: there's a Montreal meeting for Rails called Montreal on Rails)

The power of the web is a known solution in such situations, and I can see how you would lean that way. It's a good idea to cast a wide net, to learn things from people so far away that before the internet you would not have had that opportunity.

But it is still harder to learn by reading other people's code and looking at a message board than it is by sitting right next to them. So if there are local interested people, you should find them.

Also consider that as well as you learning from other people, other people can learn from you. If the Montreal community is oriented towards Rails instead of Django right now, would not be a service to expose people to Django ? Isn't it likely that there are a number of people in Montreal who are feeling the same way you are, and would jump at a chance to do some joint learning of Django, but they know of only the Rails groups ?

I'm not against the online collaboration part, and if your idea of group programmer's projects takes off there will need to be a way to find similarly interested programmers, so there will have to be a web site. But if all you do is put up a web site now, I think it will just sit as another abandoned web page on the internet; but if you find people and start interacting with them, the web site will get written by someone in due time.

In fact, in my wild dreams concerning this idea, there's also a part for real-world projects: people could indicate an interest in such or such technology, yes, but could also filter by location, or a real-world meetup could be suggested when it makes sense.

And indeed I'd like it to be a way for people unfamiliar with a technology, but curious about its basics, to meet people of complementary/similar skills.

I understand that the location feature wouldn't solve the "sit alone in the dark" problem in and by itself, though. We'll have to come up with ways to market the idea, that's very clear (perhaps by targeting some niches first?). But I believe there's a potential to it, since I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in the situation, as you say.

I think this is an interesting idea.

I decided to throw together a quick-and-dirty webapp for this purpose, inspired by an HN post (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=426127). I'm taking a little detour & learning Python & Django along the way. I'll submit it here when I have a reasonable prototype ready, maybe in a week or two.

Think we could collaborate on this? I thought about doing this we either Django or Drupal, but as you seem to favor Django, that'd be fine with me! Anyway I wasn't planning on doing this as a startup (ie. profit driven), but rather as a community project.

We could brainstorm a bit about it, perhaps have others join us in doing so.

I tried proposing a nearly identical idea a few months ago on here or the irc channel, and it was generally not favored. People argued that if you just wanted to code, join an open source project.

If anything of sorts gets off the ground, I'd be totally interested.

Do you still have the link for the thread (if it was here)?

I might try to develop it if more people show interest. Of course others would be welcome to join in the development :P Btw there's no need for a general consensus: as long as enough people are interested, there's a "market" for it.

It might even be some extension of JustHackIt, since the goal wasn't so far away, but I think Slinkset is a bit limited for the purpose (for structuring contests etc.).

Thanks for your reply.

could you give an example of what you mean by a small programming project? Also how would you choose who you work with or would it be like playing yahoo games where you can "sit" and "stand up" from projects? Maybe you could also watch people coding/conversing as an observer? Would there be a web ide or an automatically generated svn repository? Would all the projects be unique/for charity or more on a project euler/code golf level or what?

Example of a project: well the TODO list suggested in the other comment makes for a great example: it can be very small. But there could also be more original stuff, things which would not repeat anything out there. Another example would be a small iPhone arcade-like game. There are plenty such ideas, and that's the point :P Project Euler level of questions is precisely what I was thinking of (in terms of length), in fact, since working on some of its questions with a friend is a part of what made me think of the idea.

I really like your idea of Yahoo games style "programming room", but I think it'd be overkill in the beginning. I'm thinking of something more flexible, based on different (existing) technologies to coordinate the work, say simply IRC, SVN, some Wiki page, etc. It doesn't have to be a complex website: the functionality would be more at the level of getting people together and allowing them to comment on each other's work (ratings etc.). Where they go from there is suggested, but up to them.

We found a great project to test working together was a todo list. There are many questions and paths you could take, and it seems to be a good project to determine if you can get on the same page together.

Thanks for the idea. It's indeed a good example of the scope I was thinking about (as long as you're not trying to write a full-fledged GTD app with all the bells and whistles).