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Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

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Comments on Site scope - draft proposal

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Site scope - draft proposal [duplicate]

+8
−4

Closed as duplicate by Lundin‭ on Oct 20, 2020 at 10:46

This question has been addressed elsewhere. See: Community feedback: What type of questions can I ask here?

This question was closed; new answers can no longer be added. Users with the reopen privilege may vote to reopen this question if it has been improved or closed incorrectly.

EDIT: This discussion thread is mostly obsolete now that a new draft has been posted on the site. Please take further discussion & proposals to this meta post instead: Community feedback: What type of questions can I ask here?.

So it would seem that the scope of this site is yet to be defined. It is for now an "everything programming" site. I hope we can narrow it down a lot further. Here is a draft, open for discussion:

On-topic

  • Specific programming problems, where the poster includes their own attempts to solve or debug the problem.
  • Software design, architecture and modelling.
  • Code reviews where the complete code is posted and the poster is asking for a review.
  • Use of software tools used for programming or software engineering.
  • Database management and administration, including the use of tools and languages used for such.
  • Web design, including the use of tools and languages used for such.
  • Software life cycle management, including build configurations, version control, documentation, release, deployment.

Off-topic

  • Code writing requests, where the poster only presents a problem with no attempts to solve it themselves. These are considered rude and may lead to user suspensions.
  • Debug requests with insufficient code posted to answer the question.
  • Embedded systems programming, including: microcontroller programming, hardware description languages, RTOS questions, PLC programming. Please ask these questions at https://electrical.codidact.com/ instead.
  • The use of computers or software for other purposes than software engineering.
  • System/network/server administration.
  • Recommendation questions about which tools, libraries or technologies to use or where to find them.
  • Questions with artificial requirements that have no practical use, including code obfuscation and code golf.
  • Project management questions not specific to software engineering.
  • Career/study advice and workplace issues.
  • Legal or licensing advice.

Please regard the above post as community wiki and feel free to edit it when there is community consensus in the form of highly up-voted answers to this post.

discussion scope on-topic off-topic
posted over 4 years ago
4y ago
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Lundin‭
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1 comment thread

General comments (11 comments)
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+4
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I don't really see the point of listing specific things as "on topic." Any such list is bound to either be incomplete or have a grey area overlap with things off-topic.

I also disagree with some of the things you list as off topic, specifically

System/network/server administration.

I also think that this shouldn't be off topic, for the same reasons mentioned in James's response. While I am not familiar with it, I don't see why it wouldn't be on topic; configuring a server backend for a project seems like software development to me.

Questions with artificial requirements that have no practical use, including code obfuscation and code golf.

Over on Writing, we have a category for Challenges. I don't see why we can't have a similar Code Golf/Programming Challenges category here as well. (UPDATE: I suggested it here)

Finally, I want to address what you mentioned at the beginning

It is for now an "everything programming" site. I hope we can narrow it down a lot further.

This is an "everything programming" site because that is what it was founded as. Eventually, there will be more specific sites and we might start asking people to post those questions elsewhere, but until then, this will continue to be an umbrella site for any type of programming.

posted over 4 years ago
4y ago
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Moshi‭
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1 comment thread

General comments (10 comments)
General comments
Lundin‭ wrote over 4 years ago
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"I don't really see the point of listing specific things as "on topic." " The point would be that people know the purpose of the site in the form of a brief summary.

Lundin‭ wrote over 4 years ago
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"I believe Electrical is purely for hardware questions (someone correct me if I'm wrong)". Yes this is wrong. It has pretty much the same scope as electronics at SE always had. Microcontroller programming etc was always perfectly on-topic. This proposal is based on me being one of the all time top users of the embedded tag at SO, and the only one actively moderating it for many years. ->

Lundin‭ wrote over 4 years ago
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It always felt out of place and it always ended up with questions where the problem could be either software and hardware. This is quite normal in electronics. The problem was that in case you found out that the problem was hardware-related, the question suddenly turned off-topic and had to be closed. Additionally, the users at the electronics site are more suited to answer these kind of questions, since embedded systems are quite different from PC programming.

Lundin‭ wrote over 4 years ago · edited over 4 years ago
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"Over on Writing, we have a category for Challenges. I don't see why we can't have a similar Code Golf/Programming Challenges category here as well." That's a good idea. We could put code golf as well as code review in special categories.

Olin Lathrop‭ wrote over 4 years ago
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" Electrical is purely for hardware questions". Firmware questions are on topic. See https://electrical.codidact.com/help/topics. However, they need to not be ordinary software questions. How to write a loop in C isn't on topic just because the code will run in a microcontroller. To be on topic, there needs to be some relevance to direct access to hardware or that the code will run on a small resource-limited system with relevant hardware limitations.

James Jenkins‭ wrote over 4 years ago
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+1 Also I think the last paragraph beginning "This is an "everything programming" site because that is what it was founded as." should be bold.

Moshi‭ wrote over 4 years ago
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@Lundin @Olin Ah, I see, thanks. I was basing my assumption off the list of questions on that page. I wonder if the proposed microcontrollers & microcontroller programming site would be worthwhile then, if the electrical engineering site covers that... though that's more a discussion for the proposal page.

Moshi‭ wrote over 4 years ago
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@Lundin I made a suggestion for code golf ;)

Lundin‭ wrote over 4 years ago
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@Moshi The proposed site https://meta.codidact.com/questions/74991 is about hobbyist single board computers, which unlike microcontroller programming is borderline off-topic on the electronics site. There's a big difference between rolling out your own microcontroller solution or buy a hobbyist kit. Imagine someone asking questions on a chemistry site about how to solve every chemistry problem using their "My little chemist" kit for kids.

Skipping 1 deleted comment.

Olin Lathrop‭ wrote over 4 years ago
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@Lundin: Right. Many user-level questions about single-board computers are off topic on Electronics. See https://electrical.codidact.com/help/arduino where we specifically address this regarding Arduinos (historically the worst offender).