I'm finding lots of great stuff I wouldn't have seen otherwise thanks to coder.io now. It's still heavily in "beta" and hasn't been officially launched yet, but I'm already finding it useful. Further, I've been bitten by the tumblelogging bug and I'd love to have somewhere to post all of the awesome links I find that I can't put on Ruby Inside.

I'm killing several birds with one stone and turning the coder.io blog into the coder i|o "Coderlog." The Coderlog is (going to be) a blog/tumblelog for developers cut from all cloths who want to keep a finger on the pulse of what's going on in the programming world from a high level. I'll be linking to and posting about things that are about various languages, various operating systems, and various frameworks - but which should all have a generic interest to developers.

It starts now. I've already saved up some links and I'm going to start posting in a few minutes. I also plan to have the occasional post about coder.io's development and architecture, as well as how I'm promoting the service. Ultimately, though, I want this blog to be independently useful to you as a developer, whatever you're working on. If you can suggest items for me to post, etc, please go ahead - you can get me on peter at coder.io.

I love learning about new development stuff I find by chasing links around from Reddit and Hacker News. A steady stream of content comes in useful whenever I need to learn a new technology or language, be it Python, RabbitMQ, or C#. There are a wealth of sources out there — podcasts, blog posts, screencasts, mailing list conversations, forums — and they collectively keep me informed and encouraged. Problem is, surfing through all those sources is time consuming and a job in itself.

There's useful information about almost anything out there — somewhere. Finding it, organizing it, and then keeping up to date with new stuff can be hard.

coder.io is designed to solve the information crisis for programmers, but first, let's look at the sort of scenario coder.io wants to make easier:

Let's Learn About… MongoDB

The MongoDB logo

MongoDB is a document database system that's getting traction in the open source world. I find it interesting and want to learn more about it, as well as keep up to date with the latest Mongo tutorials and news.

There are a few things I can do to learn about and keep up to date with MongoDB:

• Refer to the official site. The most boring option but "OK." An issue with relying on the official site as a sole source, however, is that most projects in the open source space are run by a single developer (or a few people) and little attention is paid to providing regularly updated resources. There are exceptions and while MongoDB is a good performer in this area, they're still too busy developing a kickass tool to dump a lot of time into news and updates.

A book that, as of April 2010, isn't available to buy.

• Buy a book. MongoDB's site doesn't mention any books but I took a look on Amazon.com and found one that comes out in June. This is a common problem with new technologies — it takes time to write books. Worse, once written, books can rapidly become out of date due to the inevitable progress most new tools and languages make in their infancy. Ask anyone who wrote a book for Rails 1..

  Despite their flaws, books have a lot of pros. In my casual surveying of developers of varying skill levels, books (or e-books) were consistently the most popular way to reliably learn new technologies. They're trusted and they often provide a "one stop shop" of sorts to learners.

• Find some blogs. MongoDB has an official blog that we can subscribe to and whose archives we can scan. There's no obvious recommendation of top posts to read, though, so it's a long crawl. There have only been five posts so far this year, so it's not a one stop shop for learning, by any means. Despite this, it has focus. MongoTips is another potentially useful, targeted blog, but it is too new to judge.

  Focused blogs consistently provide good content, even if they don't get updated very often — the problem, though, is that many of the best blogs are by individual developers and wander from topic to topic (many of which you won't care about). For example, Getting Started With MongoDB and MongoMapper is a great post that a Ruby-using MongoDB learner would want to read. The rest of the blog, though, seems to wander from place to place and is heavy on the Rails 3 (a technology I may not care to learn or read about right now).

  If you're lucky, you can find meta blogs or "planet" style sites that cover the area of the technology you want to learn about. For example, MyNoSQL is a (very good) blog that covers news relating to the major "NoSQL" systems (of which MongoDB is one). Again, though, these sites can prove to be "noisy" and require some manual filtering - few offer tag level feeds for you to really hone in on what you want to know.

A Twitter search for "mongodb"

• The "firehose" approach. The indexing of blogs and social networking sites makes it reasonably easy to subscribe to "firehoses" of new content. For example, you could subscribe to the feed of a Google Blogs search for "mongodb" or monitor Twitter for the same term.

  While the Twitter search brings up some good stuff, the tweets are often redundant as the same information is tweeted by the same person. And the Google Blog search? It's unrefined and not curated — the results are often irrelevant or, worse, don't even match the keyword in any useful way.

• Social bookmarks. Finally, some mass-updated, semi-curated links! Delicious, in particular, is a great resource. Take, for example, the /tag/mongodb page. It provides, by far, the best collection of links relating to MongoDB that we've found so far. Even better, Delicious will let us combine tags. If we want to know about stuff relating to MongoDB and Ruby, we can get it at http://delicious.com/tag/mongodb+ruby

  The problem with Delicious, though, is that most developers seem to be unaware of how it can be used to locate and curate links. Another issue is one of severe redundancy. The /tag pages on Delicious don't filter links for uniqueness, so if a particular blog post is very popular, you'll see a wall of identical links. There's also a recurring issue with spam on Delicious (an issue known as "tag spamming"). Despite all of this, if you're patient and have an organized system for tracking systems like Delicious, you can find some great stuff, even if it's not all great. It's another "firehose."

The delicious.com/tag/mongodb+ruby page

• Just Google for stuff as I need it. Despite the popularity of books, I think most developers will be familiar with the "just Google for stuff as a I need it" school of learning. For the most part, Google acts as a reasonable filter, and the best blog posts, screencasts, podcasts, news articles, and so forth, make it through the noise and appear high for searches like, say, "mongodb tutorial", "mongodb python", or "how to use mongodb from f#".

  The downside to the Google approach is it takes time and effort. You're dealing with yet another firehose and keeping track of how old/out of date certain information is can be a minefield. You're also working in a very "on demand" way rather than organically picking up new stuff on a frequent basis. This might be a great way to resolve errors or to answer questions, but as a way of "keeping track" or "learning", it kinda sucks.

So what's Coder IO?

I've gone through the above process hundreds of times for different technologies. Every time I come across something new — currently Riak seems interesting — I'm Googling, hitting the blogs, looking for stuff on Twitter, and, if I really care enough to spend money, I look for (e-)books and screencasts too. I realized in 2009, however, that this process really sucks.

So, what's Coder IO? It's my attempt at fixing the process of discovering and maintaining knowledge and references relating to development topics I'm/you're interested in.

In further posts I'm going to cover how Coder IO intends to help you with this stuff and why Coder IO will be better at it than rigging up stuff in your feed reader, Reddit, Twitter, or Yahoo! Pipes account. There are a few "new" ideas in here that will help to close the usability gap in keeping track of things and allow you to have a one stop shop for all of the newest (and curated — no spam!) developer related information relating to all of your chosen developer related topics.