If you’re a web developer, you need access to information to do your job. Every day, you’re coding or debugging a new application, script, or program of some kind. You need access to documentation, bug reports, workarounds, and code examples. And, occasionally, you need to de-stress. Here are the sites I’ve incorporated into my workflow to help me get things done.
Q&A
Stack Overflow
The best site I’ve found for getting questions and answers about anything and everything code-related is Stack Overflow. As of this post, over 200,000 questions have been asked on the site.
Stack Overflow is easy to search because all questions are tagged. If you’re looking for answers to a Perl question about the GD image library, you can search for [Perl] GD and see if any previously asked questions answer the question you have.
For system administrators, Server Fault was recently launched as a sister-site to Stack Overflow.
Source Code
GitHub
GitHub hosts source code for numerous open source projects and, for paying customers, private code hosting. GitHub uses git at their distributed version control system.
GitHub is useful in several ways.
1) Host open source projects for free
2) “clone” (i.e. copy) code in order to use it or if you plan on contributing to the code base
3) Private code storage for paid accounts — store all your code in one place
A few open source projects I follow on GitHub are Prototype (Javascript library), Scriptaculous (Javascript visual effects), Scripty2 (the next version of Scriptaculous), and Slicehost-DNS (a Ruby script to automatically generate DNS records for domains hosted on Slicehost).
A few good git tutorial sites if you want to start learning it: GitHub Guides, git ready, and GitCasts.
News
Hacker News
Hacker News is a Digg-like site for “hackers.” The site is run by Y Combinator, a seed-stage investment firm started by Paul Graham. It has numerous links to articles about code, languages, entrepreneurship, business, and numerous other topics.
It has been a great resource for me and has expanded my exposure to information about programming languages, source control management, entrepreneurship, and more. The resources about git referred to earlier in this post were all gleaned from HN.
Perl-specific Sites
I’ve been using both of these sites for over ten years now and they’re absolutely essential resources for Perl developers.
CPAN is the centralized repository for Perl modules. You can search it and find modules that do all kinds of things.
PerlMonks is a Perl community that helps each other with questions, has code snippets, and talks about anything and everything Perl-related.
What are your essential development resources?
As a developer, what are your essential websites and any other resources you use to make your life easier? Post them in the comments!
