The Plan for CODING.CLICK

In this post, I will cover my plan for this site. While the list of ideas that I can think of are infinite, the number I can actually write in a single post is finite. The point is don’t think that in any way I am limiting myself by writing just these ideas. If you have an idea or a comment of any kind, you can leave them as a comment below (or you will be able to when there is a comment system; for now, you can email me at michael@coding.click).

The idea behind the site is to make coding easier and simpler and more fun for everyone. It seems to me there is too much content online but not enough good content. Learning about CSS or JavaScript or whatever, you can follow a tutorial or go through a guide, but much of the content is overly verbose, and confusing, and patronizing, etc. I think if everybody put their efforts together, we could make much better programming content than one author could ever do and vastly simplify learning programming for everyone. That is why I am creating coding.click, a wiki for coding. The click in the name comes from creating an IDE extension that will allow you to in one click import code from the site into your project. Often, there are simple problems like merging PDF files together or converting Markdown to HTML that you would think you could solve without having to learn about the history of the PDF file or about the workaround that was used to solve a problem that was already patched 10 years ago. I think being able to solve them in ten seconds without even having to leave your IDE will be almost an instant hit.

I also wanted to talk a bit about Stack Overflow which has a truly absurd market share [1] despite being far far far from perfect. I see a site which has not been endowed with any new features over the last ten years. A site which closes perfectly good questions for being opinion-based leading to dozens of slightly different versions of that same question being asked. And, not to mention, while there is a lot to like about the Q&A format, I think there are a large number of problems which could be better explained and solved with posts on a wiki.

So, thinking about Stack Overflow, how do I compete? In short, I take the best aspects of Q&A and wiki, and combine them into one. There is also a lot to be learned (i.e. copied) from Stack Overflow’s failed attempt to make a documentation site. First, on coding.click, you will be able to request a topic you want our contributors to cover. You can discuss it and work together to create a draft which can then be published as a real wiki entry. My goal of course with the site is much bigger than documentation, my goal with the site is to solve problems. Each post will consist of a problem, a list of possible solutions and an analysis saying why you might want to solve the problem and why you might pick each solution. Also, my site will be drawing a lot of inspiration from Microsoft’s docs site. Microsoft does an amazing job of providing analysis (even if understandably biased) and giving additional context on each topic. I also love their documentation hierarchy which I will also be integrating into coding.click.

I also wanted to focus on a bigger goal with this site than just making incremental improvements on top of what’s already in the market. I believe that the chaos of the internet is massively hurting productivity. Often people end up rewriting code that has already been written previously because it is not easy to find on the internet. I want to provide people a place where they can let other people know about the code they have written. Right now, if someone creates some open source software that solves a problem, there isn’t really anywhere they can go to let people find out about it. One of coding.click’s goals is to stop this wasteful repetition and provide a place where people can post about the code they wrote to stop other people going through writing it again. My site will do for code what Wikipedia did for knowledge in general which is making it much more accessible. I know this will sound crazy but I think that having a good source of clear and concise coding information could massively increase, perhaps even double developers’ productivity. This is because doing research online takes up a significant amount of developers’ time. I can tell you firsthand that when I’m trying to google through an endless maze of predominantly low-quality content just to solve a simple problem, it feels like the experience could be massively improved. This of course will make a bigger impact on developers who are less connected to other developers or less experienced. I want to allow even the least experienced developers to make just as good technical decisions as the “experts” working at large companies.

[1] Only 7% of Stack Overflow survey respondents said they check another developer community when they get stuck [https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#what-do-you-do-when-you-get-stuck]