Where do you ask your programming questions that aren’t allowed on Stack Overflow?

If you are a Software Developer, you probably use Stack Overflow (SO) every day. The vast SO community is a huge contributor to the fact that if you google any programming question, there is a good chance that you will end up on SO.

If you are a regular SO user (or even a lurker), you might know that Stack Overflow mainly focuses on “specific programming problems”. SO welcomes questions where problem exists in code, and the standard solutions involve correct code. This is perfectly fine when you are working on some project and are stuck with an error. But there are times when you want to ask meaningful subjective and open-ended questions. Sometimes you just want to have a conversation and see everyone’s perspectives without being worried about a 100% correct solution. For example, one may be interested in knowing how to build an activity feed like Facebook or how twitter solved their Justin Bieber problem. Questions like these don’t have a best answer.

Also, what about beginner and intermediate developers? They aren’t stuck with bugs or errors from day 1. They are usually learning new things and want to have opinions from other developers. SO isn’t very welcoming when it comes to these types of questions.

In fact, I came across the following story on Medium which explains how new users (experienced or not) are intimidated by Stack Overflow’s strict policies and rules.

If you open the above link and scroll down to the bottom, you will see some more resources and comments that explain why beginners/newbies hesitate to ask questions on SO.

So, where do you ask such subjective questions? To address this (and some more issues), we launched Hashnode with three core values:

• A conversational community. So, most of the opinion based or subjective questions that don’t go to Stack Overflow, go to Hashnode.
• We make it a point to be welcoming to beginner/intermediate developers.
• Hashnode brings a social factor to how developers connect and share ideas.

It’s also worth checking out this article in which a user explains why Hashnode is like Stack Overflow, but without the evil.

Is Hashnode a better Stack Overflow?

When I explain Hashnode to others, most of them ask: “Are you trying to build a better Stack Overflow?” My answer is No and it’s because we aren’t directly competing with SO. We are trying to solve a set of problems, that are beyond Stack Overflow’s area of interest. So, instead of competing with SO, we are (in a way) complementing it.

Moreover, Hashnode isn’t about just Q&A. We are building a network for Software Developers where they can:

• Ask Questions and start conversations
• Share their ideas in the form of stories
• Discover useful external resources, and share their work (GitHub repos, Codepen experiments etc)

In addition to the above, Hashnode has some other sections like Ask Me Anything and Hashnode Originals which are very popular among developers.

What do developers think of Hashnode?

Hashnode has a perception of a Social Network for Developers. Here are a few tweets that summarize this, really well.

You can check out some more tweets here.

We are a small team working towards building a friendly community for software developers. Please feel free to leave your comments. I invite you all to come and check out Hashnode. :)

This article was originally published on Medium.