Joining Everything

My apprenticeship is rapidly nearing its end, so over the last few months I joined pretty much every social network kind of thing I’ve come across. It’s not that I really expect anything to come out of just having a profile on whathaveyou.com, but you never know, right? Besides, it’s effort-less and free and all that.

So, here’s some first-impression “review” kind of thing for the sites I have a profile on. It’s also a reminder for myself, because I keep forgetting where I clicked that “register” link again…

coderwall – I don’t know what it is, but it’s fun connecting the thing to your github account and reading through the achievements. I even got two “api design” achievements because a lot of people forked the couple of lines of C I wrote some time ago. So, the badges alone might not be the greatest indicator for programming ability, but it sure is nice to look at.

Xing – Like linkedin, but more successful than that in Germany. Facebook for adults. Stupid, but occasionally funny how everyone tries to act “professional”. It’s not my kind of place, but I do sometimes get recruiting messages. As of now, they all looked like spam to me, though.

linkedin – Like Xing, but less successful than that in Germany.

Facebook – A stupid site full of ads that rarely works at all. You might have heard about it.

Google+

  • A much quieter, but also much more intelligent place (depending on who’s in your circles of course). Annoyingly feature-less for the width of technical discussions that happen on it (no threaded comments, not possible to display code verbatim, etc.).

Twitter – No idea what that is for. I have an account, because… I don’t know really. I have another account where I had a bot post some markov-chain stuff some time ago, but that’s dead, too. I hate their website, and their stupid URL-shortener and all the other stupid ideas they come up with.

stackoverflow – A good resource, but I generally dislike the community.

reddit – Not a good resource, but I do like the community.

hacker news – Sometimes a good resources, sometimes not. The people there are knowledgeable and friendly at times, but sometimes they’re neither. Much smaller than reddit, which is mostly good – but larger than /r/programming, which is mostly bad.

GithubThe best source code sharing site around. Not all that good for wikis or issue tracking, but then again neither is Google Code or Launchpad or CodePlex.

CodePlex – Microsoft’s Github clone. Nice to look at but slow as molasses. I only joined that one for a school project.

Koding – A slow, personal VM accessed via a slow in-browser terminal. I’ve obviously signed up for the beta some time ago, because I received an invite last month or so. I haven’t really tried do anything real with it, but the concept seems nice. In a “that’s so stupid it’s cool again” way.

OpenShift – Red Hat’s free open source cloud thingy. I signed up because was free and then realized that I didn’t know what to do with it. You do get a full red hat linux system, though, so that’s nice.

That would be it, though I’m sure I forgot some. I probably hit that “register” button far too often…

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