Idea For Community

Published Monday, January 30, 2006 3:55 AM

I got this idea over the weekend, whilst thinking about the developer community in South Africa. We have tons and tons of articles around certain development issues, and, off course, some sample code within these articles, but we do not have a proper repository - searchable - for these snippets of sample code. What does the community think about setting up such a repository for our local sample code?

 

 

 

by riaan

Comments

# Armand du Plessis said on Monday, January 30, 2006 8:15 AM

I think it's a great idea. I can help with a subversion repository in that regard if you want.
Depending on how hard it is to add a custom authentication provider to subversion it might even be possible to use the accounts from here as security.
Something like websvn can provide online source code browsing.


# riaan said on Monday, January 30, 2006 8:25 AM

Sounds good. I was thinking to maybe link it into sadeveloper or dotnet.org.za

# Craig Nicholson said on Monday, January 30, 2006 4:06 PM

But the search engine is implemented already... www.google.com +site:sadevelop.net

# riaan said on Monday, January 30, 2006 4:24 PM

Ok. I am talking here about giving the local developer community a central point to retrieve and store sample code and help. The help we know we have in format of sadeveloper or dotnet.org.za and plenty other sites accross the net. But, to me, i doesn't seem that we have a central storage and retrieval mechanism for sample code. Say for instance, you are looking for code to help you with wmi. So what do you do...www.google.com. a few seconds later you get loads and load of links to resources. But how many is crap?And how many is promoting the local developers and the local developer community?It sometime takes forever to find something usefull via google. And some of these sites are slow. What i am trying to promote here is the idea of a, let us call it, a google for source code....that brings back local content from a central repository. A local library almost of usefull sample code.

# Armand du Plessis said on Wednesday, February 01, 2006 8:41 AM

Something like http://www.koders.com/ but localized?

If you're willing to get a search engine working, I'd be more than happy to help out with hosting, subversion and integration into dotnet.org.za etc.

# riaan said on Wednesday, February 01, 2006 11:19 AM

Yes. Something like www.koders.com.100%. I'll perhaps contact you a bit later on and we can have a chat.

# riaan said on Thursday, February 02, 2006 7:17 AM

Should anyone want to contact me further regarding this idea, please feel free to mail me: riaan.snyders@gmail.com.


Thanks

# Ernst Kuschke said on Thursday, February 02, 2006 5:24 PM

Hi Riaan,

This is a great idea. At the moment sadev as well as dotnet.org.za has a wealth of technical information, but none in the form of source-code, utilities, etc.

I think setting up a local version of gotdotnet might be a long-shot, but an innitial repository is a cool way to get started and it might even be integrated / linked into the previously mentioned sites.

# Pierre Henri said on Thursday, February 02, 2006 9:49 PM

Hi,

This can certainly turn out to be a wonderful. But it still need some polishing...

IMO, Doing a remake of koders.com is definitively not the way to go. We need to take advantage of the "localization" (the fact that it is meant for SA people); this means creating a real community around it (actually, we may see this as adding a new feature to the current community). An important fact to remember is that it will need some time to take off, so it should be as integrated as possible.

Having a community means that authors are more accessible (on the web and in the real world) and known, there are more & better contributions (due to the communication between authors) and by contributions I mean everything: Blogs, articles, forums, wiki, snippets, applications, utilities... (they should quickly get tighly coupled)

HTH,

Pierre Henri.

# riaan said on Friday, February 03, 2006 6:58 AM

Hi Pierre,

Yes. Do I agree 100% with every comment you made. Obviously this was just a brief idea. Full details still need to be thought out and planned carefully. I think I'll go sit down this weekend again polish the idea up a bit and post to the community.


Thanks for everyone who has given input to this idea of mine. And hopefully we can make this a reality.



Thanks

Riaan

Leave a Comment

(required) 
(required) 
(optional)
(required) 

Enter the numbers above: