Online Resources for Software Developers

facilitated a brown bag lunch for the 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.

Code Katas and Koan

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

• Project Euler  is a series of challenging mathematical / computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve.
• DotNet Koans The goal of the project is to eventually have a guide for C#, F#, and VB.NET 
• Pragmatic Dave's 21 Code Katas
• Kata Catalogue

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.

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
• 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. 

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