Jaanus Kase - Likes - FriendFeed

Humans! - Robert Scoble

The site just seems so cold to me. I want to learn to code. I am a beginner. I need a few things. 1. Showcase sites so I can see what a bleeding-edge website looks like (show me five of them to cover a bunch of different use cases, social network, business site, etc etc). 2. Videos with humans who will show me how to do it. - Robert Scoble

What do you think is missing? - Robert Scoble

That's the completely wrong place to learn to code. It's for the pros! - John Rubier

Support for any version control system other than SVN. - Eric Florenzano

The code for google code isn't on google code and there's no issue tracker for the site itself. - Eric Florenzano

No humans, but it does have Androids! - John Rubier

You can only have 10 projects at once, without having to ask for permission to have more. - Eric Florenzano

John: pros already know how to code. So why do they need this site in the first place? Even pros, I find, though, when I talk with them, have blind spots and are total newbies at certain things. Dave Winer, for instance, knows RSS like the back of his hand, but does he know about building OS kernels? Probably not as much as you'd think. - Robert Scoble

The code repository browser uses AJAX and you can't use the back button to go up a directory even on WebKit nightly or Firefox 3. For that reason I just browse the WebDAV share directly. - Eric Florenzano

perhaps of interest - Ajax API Playground (on same site) - http://code.google.com/apis... - Amund Tveit

Why do you think the site needs to be beginner-friendly? I think you're mistaking it for a tutorial/learning type site. Google Code is designed for developers, by developers. If you want to learn, there are other, better resources out there. :) - Jamie Martin

The point is is that it's a replacement for SourceForge. And it does have an issue tracker e.g. http://code.google.com/p... - John Rubier

When you have projects on the site and have set it to email you whenever new issues are submitted to the bug tracker, it often doesn't email you until months later and then sends you batches of several tickets at once, which isn't all that useful. - Eric Florenzano

John: I didn't mean that it didn't have an issue tracker for each project, but where do I submit to Google all of the issues that I have with the site itself? - Eric Florenzano

Eric - Issue tracker for the site itself: http://code.google.com/p... - John Rubier

Scobleizer: Sorry for hijacking your thread :) - Eric Florenzano

Jamie: this site is aimed at growing the number of developers who use Google's technologies. Seems to me that means it should have a site that turns newbies into experts. I used to help run conferences and magazines for professional programmers. They need as much hand holding as anyone else. The arrogance in the marketplace should be ignored. It's misleading. - Robert Scoble

It seems O.K. to me Robert, kind of pricey, but otherwise O.K. - mskonfa

Jamie: Why can't it be for pros and beginners? - David Kidd

Why don't they learn from MSDN? - Aaman (Clone of FF)

John Rubier: I stand corrected on that one. Thanks for the link! - Eric Florenzano

Oh, here's a big one: Very often I get HTTP 502 errors when checking out code from google code repositories. It's impossible to learn or use the code if you can't check it out. - Eric Florenzano

David: lots of programmers love strutting that they are so smart that they don't need to read the manuals and they don't need "tutorials." It's bulls**t. I've seen that over and over again in my career. - Robert Scoble

Aaman: when I worked at Microsoft most of the coders I knew there admitted to me that they used Google to search MSDN. That's when I knew Google was going to be way better than anything Microsoft could do in search. (I wrote a letter to Bill Gates saying he should block Google from being used inside Microsoft, which would increase pressure on the MSDN and MSN teams to improve their search quality -- the first time I visited Google, back when I worked at Microsoft, I saw that a HUGE amount of searches ... - Robert Scoble

...were being done from Redmond, Washington, which is where Microsoft is located. When I worked at Microsoft that pissed me off cause it demonstrated that Microsoft's own employees knew that Google was better and nothing was being done about it. That was three years ago. - Robert Scoble

Google code it to host projects. The contents for the projects is up to the developers of those projects. If you are talking about Google-only projects on that site, I don't see any mainstream items of theirs that have really lame docs. Usually Google is quite good. Here's all the docs for the Maps API: http://code.google.com/apis... lots of nice, east to read documentation. - John Rubier

I think what you're saying would also be along the lines of suggesting that GitHub and SourceForge aren't user-friendly as well. I think that there are better communities out there that are geared more towards getting people more comfortable with programming, places like http://stackoverflow.com or http://dreamincode.net - Jamie Martin

I used google to search MSDN just today :D And LinkedIn for that matter! - John Rubier

Jamie: Stackoverflow rocks. Fast Company's developers RAVE about that site. - Robert Scoble

Overall, anyone would agree that Microsoft is far more developer-friendly, what with DevDays, etc. and I think we tend to ignore their enterprise apps (Dynamics, etc.) far more than they should be. - Aaman (Clone of FF)

http://google.com/codesearch may only be tangentially related, but I *love* it. It makes figuring out how to use APIs 100x more easy. Tons of examples at your fingertips. - Noah Evans

I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding here. Google Code is a code repository, not a tutorial. I store and version control my TwitVim code there. It doesn't follow that there should be a Vim script tutorial on Google Code. - Morton Fox

Don't re-purpose code.google.com to make it a beginner's learning tool.. instead they should use it as it was designed.. a code repository for projects (should Microsoft Visual SourceSafe be a beginner's learning tool?) However, I agree that there should be a starting point, an actual learning site for Google technologies (but not in sake of code.google.com and the concept of a project code repository) - RAD Moose

It would be nice if I didn't have to dig (at all) for SDK/IDE's and their code search http://www.google.com/codesea... link should be the first thing under the Developer Resources header. - J. Abdul-Qahhar

RAD: well, OK, but when I search Google for "Google Code Tutorials" here http://www.google.com/search... what do I find? Yes, a link to code.google.com :-) - Robert Scoble

Scoble - why did you go to code.google.com instead of, say, stackoverflow.com, in the first place? What makes you think they should support beginners? I'm not saying either way is right or wrong, just wondering what was the trigger for you. - Jaanus Kase

Scoble makes some good points. When you are new to writing any kind of code you often don't know where to even begin looking for help. I start most educational excursions with a search on Google so to me it makes sense to have Google Code include some noob resources. BTW, thanks to Jamie Martin for the link to http://stackoverflow.com. That site is brilliant! I wish I knew about it a long time ago. - Michael Whitehurst

Jaanus: because most beginners won't know about Stackoverflow, they'll go to Google and start searching for how to code, etc. and they'll find Google's Code site. By the way, it's a fun exercise to do to any web site. Ask yourself "what's missing?" "what's cool?" Do the same thing with BestBuy and Amazon, for instance. - Robert Scoble

Maybe just ask them to put a more prominent link to http://code.google.com/edu/ on the main page. Right now you have to click the "More products" link to see "education" under the resources section. Otherwise I still maintain that the site suits its intended audience quite well. IMVHO. - John Rubier

John: even that site has no humans on it. For a site that has such a huge impact on Google's business it sure is damn dry. Compare to http://stackoverflow.com -- lots of humans there. - Robert Scoble

Stackoverflow is the antithesis to Google: a bunch of people too lazy to search with Google themselves! ;) - John Rubier

Google's actually pretty good at the videos-with-humans thing compared to Facebook and others. Check out http://developers.facebook.com and tell me how that compares. - Jesse Stay

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