Online Resources for Software Developers

facilitated a brown bag lunch for my company's developers today. The topic for the brown bag was online resources that are useful for software developer in their work. We came up with a list of which I have recorded in the following section. It is far from a comprehensive list, however it contains some interesting and useful resources.

Programming Challenges

Test yourself by solving maths and algorithmic problems.

• Project Euler  is a series of challenging mathematical / computer programming problems  
• Advent of Code has small programming puzzles. New puzzles are released each year in the lead up to xmas.

Programming Contests

Test yourself against others

• Codeforces 
• Atcoder 
• Sphere Online Judge

Interactive Tutorials

work though exercises and tutorials

• Free code camp learn 12 topics
• Codecademy wide range of topics
• Exercism learn 88 languages
• Leetcode  learn 18 languages
• HackerRank  learn 15 topics
• Codewars learn 21 languages
• The Odin Project learn full stack web development
• JetBrains Academy learn a wide range of topics
• Scrimba learn full stack web development
• Javascript.info learn JS
• Pybites Platform le
• Python tutor python compiler  online compiler
• Python tutor   java, c, c++ and javascript online compiler 
• Kaggle Learn learn data science
• Datacamp learn data science and GenAI

Programming Games

learn in a gamified way

• codingame control minions though one of 25 languages.
• Vim Adventures   learn Vim though a rogue-like game.
• CheckIO python     solve Python challenges on floating islands
• CheckIO typescript solve Typescript problems on floating islands
• Swift Playgrounds
• Robocode.  program robot using Java or .NET.
• Replit online IDE with AI assistant
• Screeps code your units in JavaScript
• WarriorJS code your way through rogue-like dungeons
• SQL Murder Mystery solve a crime using SQL queries.
• CSS Grid Garden write CSS code to grow your carrot garden
• Flexbox Froggy write CSS code to help Froggyn

Code Katas and Koan

These are exercises to help you to learn elements and features of programming languages.
Examples as follows

• Ruby Koans uses a test based approach to teach  Ruby
• DotNet Koans based on Ruby Koans but teaches C# & VB.NET 
• Pragmatic Dave's 21 Code Katas - The original inspiration for many of the others
• Kata Catalogue of well-known structured katas.
• Cyber Dojo  Practice TDD and refactoring
• GildedRose Refactoring Kata supports many languages 
• Rosetta Code
• Ninety-Nine Prolog Problems original 99 problems that help you learn Prolog
• Ninety-Nine Scala Problems port of 99 problems to Scala
• Ninety-Nine Lisp Problems port of 99 problems to Lisp
• Ninety-Nine_Haskell_Problems port of 99 problems to Haskell
• 4clojure learn clojure by solving problems
• Scala Exercises  to help learn Scala

Podcasts

These are Internet radio shows often in either a interview style or a panel discussion style
Examples as follows 

• .Net Rocks twice weekly discussion of what is happening in the .Net world
• Software Engineering Radio more academic and theoretical
• Hanselminutes very much like .Net Rocks
• Herding Code concentrates on web development
• Deep Fried Bytes Technology Podcast .Net Rocks from the South
• This Developer's Life - Stories About Developers and Their Lives the people / soft skills side of being a software developer

Screencasts

These are screen capture videos of people demonstrating technology.
Examples as follows

• Dime Casts.Net; Inform and Educate in 10 Minutes or Less 198 video and counting
• .Net Rocks TV 204 videos and counting
• Code 4 Fun Microsofties having fun
• jQuery for Designers has text articles as well as screencast tutorials.

Vodcasts

These are Internet TV shows often in a interview style.
>Examples as follows

• FLOSS Weekly about open source software
• InfoQ Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community

MOOCs

MOOC stands for a Massive Open Online Course.

Examples as follows.

• Aquent
• Coursera
• CodeCademy
• edX
• Khan Academy
• MIT's OpenCourseWare
• MongodDB University
• Udacity
• Udemy
• UWA class2go

Forums

These are thread based discussion groups often centred around a particular technology
Often better for answering questions if the technology is niche.

Examples as follows

• Yahoo! Groups
• Google Groups

Question and Answer Sites

The members of these sites help each other by asking and answering questions

Often better for answering questions if the technology is common.

Examples as follows

• StackOverflow is a programming Q&A site that’s free. 
• Anyone can ask, answer, or edit questions on  Quora
• ServerFault is a Q&A site for system administrators and desktop support professionals that’s free.
• dev.to is a community of software developers

Blogs

Rants, tips and tricks from those in the know.
Examples as follows

• Ayende @ Rahien creator of nHibernate, Rhino Mock and RavenDB
• Scott Hanselman compiler of the Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows
• Jeff Atwood co-founder of StackOverflow

Events and Meetups

These sites help you find out what is happening in Melbourne

• Melbourne User Groups
• 💀Melbourne Events calendar of events
• Eventbrite events made easy
• Meetup with people with common interests in real life. Home to a lot of user groups.

Sample Code and Code Projects

These sites give a more in depth treatment of problems
Examples as follows

• Code Guru
• Code Project
• Geeks For Geeks 
• GitHub.  largest code hosting platform 
• Sourceforge large open source repo
• Program Creek 
• Google Code
• 💀Programmers Heaven

Miscellaneous

• The Wayback Machine. Have a broken link? An important resource that has disappeared? Go back in time and find it. 

Related Posts

• Deliberate Practice
• Melbourne User Groups
• Software Development Book List 

Does anyone have some useful online resource that they would like to through into the mix?