Founder's Blog

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