StackOverFlow, Skout and Why Sharing Knowledge is Good

StackOverFlow is a new social media tool that describes itself ‘Digg for programming questions’. It was created by two well known programmers in the U.S., Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, to serve the greater software development community.

Skout is an index created by Mokokoma Mokhonoana of Pretoria, South Africa. It’s a database of design resources aimed at filling similar role for web developers and graphic designers. It might be referred to as a sort of ‘Alltop for developers’ although not nearly as robust. Skout makes it a priority to promote resources from African creatives but it’s not limited to the African market indexing design tips, resources and content from all over the globe. Although not as impressive as other sites like it, I like the mentality it promotes in the African design community. What it lacks in features, it makes up for in spirit.

Building a Community

Few great developers come from vacuums. They need mentors, they need peers, they need guidance and this means they need to have their questions answered. In Africa (Uganda specifically) this culture is still in it’s infancy. There are also a number of ideas and cultural philosophies working against it. There seems to be a paranoia about idea theft, lack of credit being passed one’s way and that to help someone is to create your competitor. Intellectual property laws here are still murky as well, which compounds these concerns.

History Repeats

These are all valid fears but as the IT community in Africa evolves, becoming more lucrative for all, they will fade. In the early 90′s things weren’t that different in United States. Internet there was expensive which made it hard to share information even if you wanted to. Code was considered a high commodity and outside of the open source community, no one was inclined to help anyone they didn’t know do anything. The stakes were too high. When fast access became abundant and the economy bounced back from the great Bubble Burst, the software community changed to a far more collaborative environment where sharing became it’s own reward.

Africa is at that stage right now. People sometimes only get one shot at ‘selling’ their big idea (domestically or abroad) and if someone steals that idea it could literally be the difference between life as a big-wig executive at a local telco or a life as a boda-boda driver.

Taking Note

Websites like StackOverFlow and Skout support the idea of software development as a community and a culture that should support itself more often than not. As more information is offered freely, everyone benefits. If your peers start to become more competitive than you, it’s incentive to focus on improving your own skills. If one of your fellow students sells an idea and makes a lot of money, it should serve as motivation to do the same, bigger and better.

These aren’t the only examples by any means. There’s also D-Zone (for developers), CSS Globe (for designers), Snipplr (snippets of code) etc. All of them operate under the philosophy that better developers makes for a better web.