Welcome to the Codidact site for Software Development! We're glad you're here and we're excited to see what you will build. This community is starting "from scratch", without importing Q&A from other sites, so your community can set its own direction.¹ Please ask questions about all aspects of software development in the Q&A category and use this Meta category to discuss site policies, scope, customizations, and other matters. You can report bugs and ask for support here, too.

All of software development? Isn't that rather broad?

We had a lot of discussion about how to approach this site or sites. At very large scale we question whether a single site serves its users, and there were suggestions to instead create several focused sites for individual languages or technologies. On the other hand, the Codidact community is currently small, and we are concerned about premature fragmentation. So instead we're launching one site and planning for future spin-offs from the beginning. We will also work with our friends at TopAnswers, who also have several technical communities, so we can together serve the communities that form around specific languages and technologies.

Bring your questions about code, software design, architecture, process, tools, testing, and technologies here. In time the site will grow large and we expect that subcommunities with more-specific interests (like web development or C++ or machine learning) might feel lost in the larger community. When a subcommunity is ready to get a place of its own, we'll help make a smooth transition with good cross-community connections.

Please use this meta category to further refine the scope. What I wrote in the previous paragraph was the result of initial discussions, not a final edict from on high. On matters of site scope we defer to the topic experts -- you who are working to build this community.

Can I bring over my Q&A from Stack Overflow or other SE sites?

It didn't make sense to us to do any bulk imports, but sometimes there are specific questions and answers that are especially valuable. We will set up a way to request import of specific questions, complying with the content license. If you are the author of imported posts, you'll be able to claim them here.

For now, please focus on new content, which will help distinguish this community from others.

General mechanics

If you already have an account on another Codidact community, then you're already in the system and don't need to create a new account. (Just sign in if you haven't already.) If you're new to Codidact, click "sign up" to create an account for yourself.

This site is running a beta version of Codidact. We started with a Q&A platform that already existed, and over the coming weeks, we will be evolving this software toward the feature set we've identified for the first official release of Codidact. This means some things will change (mostly things will be added), but the core -- a community built around people working together to ask and answer questions -- will not change. You can read more about the vision for the platform and the features for the first release.

If you see something that needs attention, please flag it. If you run into problems or have questions, post here on meta. Reputation and privileges based on it will eventually be replaced by more specific stats (like how many answers you've posted and roughly their total score), and a system of trust levels will grant privileges based on your activity on the site.

We don't have on-site chat yet, but there is a Discord server for Codidact communities. Pop into the "access-management" channel and check off the communities you want to see chat rooms for. (This is so you don't have to wade through rooms for sites you're not interested in every time you visit.)

Welcome aboard!

If you'd like to help us build the software that runs our sites, visit our repository or join our project chat.

posted over 4 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Monica Cellio‭ staff

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