1000 categorized online resources shared between novice web developers
Recently I “consulted” the freeCodeCamp's Gitter chatrooms to get a list of the domains of some quality online resources to learn Javascript and web development. Because a simple list was not informative enough, I also classified them based on an ad-hoc categorization I prepared specifically for this project.
After excluding several domains and including other ones I ended up with a raw list of around 1000 relevant categorized domains out of about 9000 ones.
I wanted to share the resulting list of resources with you. A draft of the list can be now obtained from a repository given just at the end of this article. Meanwhile let me highlight few things I also found while creating the list.
Sustained Popularity is more than a Pareto Rule
Indeed not 20% as the typical pareto principle suggests, but just about 2% of the domains were mentioned about 80% of the time along the analyzed period (1 year). Based on this selection, people learning to code tended to invite others to emphasize on the use of very few key resources such as stackoverflow.com, mdn.org, w3schools.com, medium.com publications and writers, and in this particular case medium.freecodecamp.org.
Written Content (blogs, articles, books, newsletters) the most varied
Resources mentioned by new coders that felt in this category didn’t distinguish by its popularity but rather by its variety. This partially had to do with the fact that this is the most available content on Internet.
NEWS (includes: blogs, books, newsletters, etc.) 406
PACKAGE (includes: libraries, api’s, frameworks, etc) 232
TRAINING (courses, tutorials, training, guides, etc) 153
THEME (sites offering themes, templates, code solutions) 50
REPL (generally sites used to transform code online) 47
BUSINESS (business, NGOs, privately-owned sites) 42
DOCS (instructions for developers, protocols ) 41
COMMUNITY (Q&A, social media, fora, chats ) 22
PAAS (PaaS and similar platforms, eg. Heroku) 15
ECOMMERCE (e-commerce platforms) 8
SENGINE (either general or tailored search-engines) 7
REVIEWS (sites dedicated to review/rate services or products) 6
NOCLASS (pages not falling in previous categories, no info) 67
Coding on the web, for the web
For novice freeCodeCamp programmers the first opportunity to use an editor in the cloud might have been the freeCodeCamp challenges. For the most advanced ones it would have been codepen.io , which is still the most popular cloud editor between freeCodeCamp students
NOTE— codepen.io was excluded from my draft list because its use was too obvious for freeCodeCamp users.
However freeCodeCamp's new coders were discovering many other online editors and tools.
The category I made for this kind of tools and services was called "REPL". Just only for this article I made a deeper sub-classification of the "REPL" domains, as below:
- EDITORS & DEV ENVIRONMENTS: jsconsole.com, jsben.ch, runnable.com, jsfiddle.net, cloud9.com, jsbin.com, glitch.com, repl.it, plnkr.co, www.jdoodle.com, hastebin.com, makecode.com, code.reloado.com, quokkajs.com
- JS CODE TESTERS/MODIFIERS: jscompress.com. jshint.com, jsonlint.com, jsbeautifier.org, js2ls.org, jsperf.com, jslint.com, www.jsweet.org
- HTML TESTERS/MODIFIERS: www.html.am, html2jade.org, html5.validator.nu
- CSS TESTERS/MODIFIERS: csscompressor.com, www.cssmatic.com, cssgridgarden.com, www.cleancss.com, csslint.net, resizing.flixster.com
- COLOUR SCHEMES: coloreminder.com, rgb.to, coloreminder.com, www.colr.org
- JSON MODIFIERS: myjson.com, json.parser.online.fr, jsonschema.net, jsonformatter.curiousconcept.com
- REGEX : regex101.com, www.debuggex.com
- OTHERS: pastebin.com
The list I made includes the analysis of messages from four Gitter freeCodeCamp chatrooms: HelpBackEnd, HelpFrontEnd, HelpJavaScript, and Help between Jul-16 / Jul-17. If you wonder what I did, you can find the selections, eliminations and general procedures sketched in the following repository:
https://github.com/evaristoc/fCC_R3_DataAnalysis.
The latest draft of classified domains can be found in the data/annotatedplatformsphase1_a6.csv file of that folder.
The list is far from being a comprehensive one. It is also a draft and therefore subject to improvements and further changes. However I expect that this draft can help some people start speeding up a a sometimes painstaking online search.
This list is part of an on-going project developed with the support of the members of the Chingu / freeCodeCamp community and it is expected to develop in different directions and modules.
Let me know if you liked the article by clicking the 💚 below or at the side the article, or let a comment? That’s all for now. Happy coding!
