Founder's Blog

We are happy to announce that we are able to increase the free disk space for all development projects up to 2 GB. We believe that free code hosting based on GIT and SVN is a center piece of the further development of bettercodes.org. This should be the foundation for a new range of services. Our goal is to offer a comprehensive software development environment which is open, integrated, technology-neutral, and free of charge.

All repositories are hosted with Amazon Web Service . They provide very high durability of your data and nothing will get lost. We connected this hosting solution with our community web server so you can login into your repositories with your credentials. Your changes are handed over to the S3 on a secure connection. We are also working on a ssh key based authentication for svn and git.

We are happy to announce three new features to the bettercodes.org platform.

The developer scene is dynamic. New things are happening every day. If you come across an interesting news or information which is relevant for developers, just share it with the community with the SHARED LINKS feature in the exchange section. You can also discuss or commend shared links.

Sometimes even the best developer has questions. Make use of the comprehensive knowledge of the developer community and ask your programming question to the community. Or check out the open questions and answer them to help other developers. Help other developers within the “QUESTIONS & ANSWERS” feature within the exchange section.

We also implemented a SPAM REPORTING button bettercodes.org. If you receive spams in the future please click this button and if more users do this the according account will be deactivated and the email and IP address blocked immediately. We want to support an open communication environment for all developers on bettercodes.org and therefore we don’t want to set the barriers for communication higher. But we are very strict with misuse and spamming!

Now we are running the bettercodes.org project for almost five months and we have received very positive feedback from you. Thank you for this! But we are still a small team of only four people, so we need your creativity and your capabilities to make bettecodes.org the best place for the best developers in the world!

How can you contribute?

We have released the first version of our source code two weeks ago and some of you took the opportunity and downloaded it. bettercodes.org is an Open Source project which relies on the contribution of its members. We see two ways how you can contribute to improve bettercodes.org and to become part of the journey.

Add new features and functions to the platform. If you have any idea which new feature or function will help to improve bettercodes.org and would provide value to the developer community, please get in touch with us. Bjoern (Gottowik) will coordinate your contributions and answer your questions on how to contribute to bettercodes.org
Find, report, and eliminate bugs. If you have the time to review the source code, please send us all information about bugs, security gaps, and possible improvements on the existing code. Also Bjoern will coordinate that with you.
What’s new?

Within the last three weeks we have made good progress and improved some features:

Answers. The answers section has been redesigned and several bugs have been eliminated there. If you have a developer question to the community put it there. If you are able to answer a question with your expertise, please go to ‘xchange’ into the submenu ‘answers’.
Snippets. We have optimized the code snippets section and integrated the famous generic code highlighter “geshi”. Great work! Now this section is almost working properly and you will find shared snippets easily or you can share your snippets with the community: go to ‘xchange’ into the submenu ‘code snippets’.
Server Environment. We are currently changing our server unit on Amazon from a high CPU to an extended memory unit. We also experienced some problems with the backups and needed to redesign the server environment. Expect an even faster platform the next couple of weeks for your exciting bettercodes experience.
…and what’s coming up?

Some of you commented that the integration of the different services is not good enough. We share this view. As next step we will improve the integration of the different features and functions, e.g. that you can see questions which are related to your skills set and your experiences or maybe that you are aware about any comment on a shared code snippet or link.

The basic idea is that every user will have the full control on the degree of integration based on his personal willingness to contribute to the community. Therefore we will develop a new concept for the individual developer profile and a reputation management system which will accredit you individual contribution to the bettercodes.org developer community.

First of all we want to welcome all new members who joined since our last update in early June. Each of you is heartily welcome!

After weeks of hard coding and bug fixing some of our team members spent a few days on vacation. But now we are all back with lots of new energy and plenty of new ideas.

What’s going on?

New navigation concept integrated. As you can see we have designed and implemented a new navigation concept for bettercodes.org. Below the main menu bar you can find drop-down submenus with shortcuts to the main features and often used functionality. The main idea behind this navigation concept is to provide direct and quick access to all relevant information, areas and features.

Moreover this new navigation concept is the first step in our evolution path. If the platform continues to grow like it is today than it will become more and more complex. We’re currently considering a customizable navigation, so that every member can customize his navigation based on his preferences. Expect more to come!

Pi x 1.000 contest is running! We are running the Pi x 1.000 contest for those bettercoders who are supporting the developer community by inviting other developers to bettercodes.org. If you not familiar with the contest, please click the following link (http://bettercodes.org/competitions/invitation_challenge or the button right from the navigation to get more information and to receive your personal invitation code. We have total prizes of 3,141.59 US-Dollar.

Software updated. Bettercodes is mainly based on WordPress and Buddypress. Both projects have published new stable releases of their great work and we could not wait to take them as our new code base. Your developer community is now running WordPress 3.0 and Buddypress 1.2.5.2. We also would like to thank the creators of W3 total cache which is now available with an awesome browser cache extension and integrates smootly with Amazon Simple Storage Solution and CloudFront.

Ready to upload your documents. If you want to share your documents with other developers the group section could be the right place. Our team members Niklas and Bjoern put much effort and time in this feature. If you miss something drop them a PM.

…and what’s coming up?

Preparing our sources for the first official release seems to be a time consuming job. We really do not want to keep you longer in suspense so we have decided to give you all a first insight into our work by providing read access to the bettercodes’ code repository. We really hope that you cut us some slack because we did not have much time to write a good documentation.

Check out the sources and have fun at: https://svn.bettercodes.org/bettercodes

We are also working to improve some areas of bettercodes.org. We received some feedback about how to improve our code snippets section and our questions and answers section. Currently we are redesigning those sections, fix some remaining bugs and add some new features.

First of all we would like to welcome all new bettercoders who joined since our first update in early May!

We are online now for almost two months. We received a lot of encouragement, feedback, suggestions, and criticism. We’re working very hard to recognize, reflect and incorporate all your feedback into our planning and development efforts. But due to the fact that we are only a small team, it might take a while before everything is resolved, answered and integrated. Please be patient with us!

What’s going on?

We are still working hard on bug fixing and our open issue list is becoming shorter and shorter. Therefore we took the opportunity to make some changes and add some new features to bettercodes.org.

First competition started. With this update we want to introduce our first competition. The “Pi x 1,000” contest has started now! We have no big marketing budget left, so we need to apply other ways to inform developers all over the globe about bettercodes.org. The “Pi x 1,000” contest offers a reward to all members who recommend bettercodes.org and invite their fellow coders and developer friends to join. We received a donation of about 3,1415.92 US-Dollar which serves as the total prize for this competition. For more detailed information and registration please go to the “competitions” section. Please participate in this contest!
Free code hosting (GIT & SVN). We added a free-of-charge code hosting. This can be used from all development projects within bettercodes.org. All project leaders have the freedom of choice to select between SVN and GIT as their preferred code hosting solution. All repositories are hosted in the backend of the Amazon Web Service in their Simple Storage Solutions (S3). They provide 99.999999999% reliability of your data and nothing will ever get lost. We connected this solution with our web server (Amazon Instances with backup ECB) so you can login into your repositories with your bettercodes.org credentials. Your changes are handed over to the S3 on a secure connection. For the future it would also be possible to add additional code hosting solutions. Please let us know what you would like to see.
Now we are an official BuddyPress showcase. As you may know we use BuddyPress, a social network spin-off of WordPress, for dedicated parts of bettercodes.org. We are proud that bettercodes.org is now an official showcase for BuddyPress and we are happy to contribute our enhancements and add-ons to our friends from WordPress and BuddyPress community. This is the judgment, why bettercodes.org is a showcase : “Bettercodes.org is a well-designed and well-implemented use of BuddyPress that is popular and growing.”
…and what’s coming up?

We know that many of you are keen to get access to our source code and start to contribute new ideas and new features to bettercodes.org. We are working hard on documenting, cleaning and optimizing our source code. We are confident to provide our source code to you in the upcoming weeks.

We are also working on a new navigation concept for bettercodes.org. The main idea behind this is to provide direct and quick access to all relevant information, areas and features. Moreover this new navigation concept is the first step into an evolution path. The platform will grow in the future and become more and more complex. We currently think about an individual navigation that every member can customize the whole navigation bar based on their preferences.

As an Open Source project it is important to benefit and contribute to the Open Source community. For bettercodes.org we decided after a intensive evaluation to rely on BuddyPress for our social network features. We believe that BuddyPress as a WordPress spin-off or flavour is a great solution to achieve our mission to empower software developers to share their ideas and empower them to turn those ideas into code that works.

We are proud that bettercodes.org is now a official showcase for BuddyPress (Link to showcase site). The judgement of our WordPress / BuddyPress friends about bettercodes.org is:

Why it’s in the Showcase: Bettercodes.org is a well-designed and well-implemented use of BuddyPress that is popular and growing.

The whole bettercodes.org team is happy that we can contribute enhancements and new features to improve BuddyPress in the future…

Dear bettercoders!

It is now nine months ago that the core bettercodes developer team sat initially together and decided to do something new:

• a community just for developers and their needs
• a community that offers advanced project management and hosting capabilities for free
• a community that is truly open source
• a platform that doesn’t differentiate between free and premium services
• a platform that is free of advertising and transparent in its interests
• a platform that will benefit from the skills of the best developers around the world

in other words we had this dream of a better place for better coders: bettercodes.org!

Now that we’re online for a little more than four weeks we’re overwhelmed with your interest. Just with the word of mouth and our fearless community manager Sandra we became attractive for more than 1.200 bettercoders from around the world. What a success! What a pleasure to see you all here.

Now, what are our plans for the future?

First of all we want to make sure that you feel that this is your platform. Please help us to improve bettercodes.org with every release cycle. Please send us your feedback! We’re a small team so we need your participation and your goodwill (we’re working with a very small team and limited financial/timely resources). To progress things we have set the following priorities for the next steps (we’re working on some of the items in parallel)

1. 1. Bugfixes, bugfixes, bugfixes
   bettercodes is still beta and we have launched, well knowing that our platform is (and won’t be) bug free. A lot of you have helped to identify critical issues. Please continue to do so! We have set ourselves the following priorities
   1. a. Security bugfixes. You might have noticed that our platform is based on buddypress (wordpress). While we have bypassed and customized a lot of functionality we still have inherited a lot of the code base. We’re working closely with the buddypress community to give our findings and our fixes back to their development community. But again – we need your help: if you find issues please tell us and we will work on them as soon as we can.
   2. b. Functionality bugfixes.

What do YOU think? Please send your feedback.

1. Give our development back to the community and extend bettercodes.org
   as outlined in the bugfix section we want to give knowledge and developments back to the open source community. What are we doing:
   1. Develop additional functionality and provide it to others. You might have noticed that we now have a “chat” function. It is our understanding that the buddypress community is anxiously waiting on functionality like this. We will test our code for another while and then give the source code to buddypress and other interested coders.
   2. Open up our source code and provide it to you. The team is working hard on documenting, cleaning and optimizing our source code. We will be able to provide our source code in the near future. You will find it in the lab section of bettercodes. The basic idea behind this is that we enable you to extend the bettercodes platform with your features. For example: we might be missing some project management functionality that you urgently need. By opening up bettercodes we will allow you to write extensions that we (after some sort of review) will link into the production release of bettercodes so that you and your fellow coders can use it.

What do YOU think? Please send your feedback.

1. Improve performance & provide additional project management features
   Now that we have an ever growing community and functionality like chat our performance does not seem to be sufficient. Also we got a lot of requests to extend our project management capabilities. Here is what we are doing
   1. We’re currently in the progress of moving our installation to a bigger server instance to provide better performance. Also we’re reworking parts of our code to achieve higher performance. Still a lot of work to be done here but we are well underway.
   2. When we have moved to a bigger server infrastructure we will be able to integrate additional project management functionality and offer it to you. First of all we want to offer SVN and code repositories. While in the future we would like to offer alternatives we would like to start with GIT. In the near future we will implement an issue management system. This should address the most pressing needs.

What do YOU think? Please send your feedback.

1. Improve usability
   our landing page seems to be a big hurdle for a lot of interested users. We have decided to make it easier to become a bettercoder. We would like to do the following
   1. Show more information on the landing page on what’s behind the “entrance”, to show that we’re a serious platform and not a rip-off
   2. Make registration easier. Ideally you should be able to register just with a nickname and a valid e-mail address
   3. Improve the profile settings. We believe that a lot of members of our community would like to show their skills and references. This should be optional but feature rich, so that you can present yourself in an adequate manner.
   4. For b.) and c.) it might be useful to be able to import existing profiles from linkedin, facebook, etc.

What do YOU think? Please send your feedback.

1. Start competitions
   you might have had a look at our competitions section. We will start with our competitions in the near future. Currently we have two main interests:
   1. Increase the number of bettercoders. We would like to start an invitation challenge to give you an incentive to invite your friends and colleagues to use bettercodes for their projects.
   2. Enhance the bettercodes functionality. Once we have published our source code we’re very curious to see what kind of additions, extensions and functionalities you will develop.

What do YOU think? Please send your feedback.

Please help us to promote the bettercodes idea and invite your friends, provide feedback to us and use bettercodes for your projects!

We hope you like what we are doing.

See you at bettercodes!

Your development team

After several months of hard coding we are pleased to make the initial version of bettercodes.org available to the global community of developers. We invite all coders and developers to join bettercodes.org and create the most amazing and thrilling collaboration platform for developers based on the Open Source philosophy.

For us bettercodes.org is like a journey without know the “final destination”. We are curious what bettercodes.org will be in one or two years. In general we will not preset any limitations for additional plugins or directions The only requirement is that all add-ons should be valueable for coders. The vision of bettercodes.org is to enable developers from all over the world to become “even better developers”.

We are still in a very early stage. Currently it is more alpha than beta status. But we are keen for your feedback and comments. Please, take some time, explore bettercodes, provide your feedback, start using it and invite other coders to bettercodes.org. We are aware that bettercodes.org has currently several major and minor bugs and we are working heavily on fixing them.

After fixing the major bugs we will release the first version of our Open Source package thru our bettercodes.org labs section.

Your bettercodes.org team