A system to share the way YOU do things

Many developers like to form their opinions about the “right” way to do things, which tools to use and with which setup. These evolve over time, a library replaces another, a paradigm shifts, an approach becomes obsolete. We jump on bandwagons, try things out, adopt and love them, fall out of love, deprecate and forget. This happens over the whole career of a developer. Even now, looking at about a year working with meteor, I can see trails of technologies that replaced one another

  • iron router -> flow router -> react router maybe next?
  • blaze -> blaze with mvvm -> react
  • pubsub -> maybe apollo?
  • Project structure: ad hoc -> mantra -> separate npm modules in own module repository

Surely there were other evolutions that got lost in time. There were many other problems I had to solve, solutions I evaluated and then picked one. Maybe some of those loops I could have avoided if I had known the approaches of people I trust, if I had seen the loops other people went through.

Every single one of us has had their own evolution of adopted technologies and favorite approaches. But only few of us share this with the world, either through blogging, creating boilerplates or libraries. And this is a pitty. There are many people in the community that I’d like to be able to follow more closely - what technologies is @msavin evaluating? What new tool did @sashko just adopt? What package did @joshowens replace with something better? What new programming patterns is @arunoda applying?

I believe that there is a missing channel where one can easily log and share - very generally stated - the way one solves one’s problems, in particular the whole lifecycle of evaluation, adoption and replacement of such approaches and solutions. And where one can follow people one trusts.


This section is more concrete. I’m imagining a stream of events

  • user is evaluating solution for problem
  • user dropped solution for problem
  • user adopted solution for problem

For example

  • nmaro is evaluating flow-router for Meteor routing
  • nmaro dropped iron-router for Meteor routing
  • nmaro adopted flow-router for Meteor routing

(sorry to the creators of iron-router, if you are around ;))

One could then have a profile listing all currently adopted solutions for different problems.

What do you think? Maybe there is something like that already? How do you think could this idea be improved? I think it shouldn’t be too much effort to make a meteor app out of it.

This would definitely be pretty cool, but at least for me it would be too much effort to go there and update stuff.

I think StackOverflow Documentation has an element of this - rather than looking for the “right” answer, you can submit several articles on the same topic with different opinions.

But I’m not really sure what I would get out of it - if there’s something I’m really excited about, I’ll probably write a blog post or something.