Code Review Blog - Phase 3 - Recruit contributors

Question

On Hold SE Community Devs:

The short of it is, it's kinda on us to make something that works, and we don't really do that. There isn't any real proper integration between the systems and the authors suffer as a result of it. Ultimately leading to fairly ill fates to most all of the blogs. We're looking to fix all this but it's going to take some time, and we feel that it'd be better that we have people wait (or perhaps even prepare) for a more complete blog experience that we'll offer down the road.

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Anticipating ongoing interest, adding phase 3 question:

Who will write entries for the blog? Starting a blog is a bit like going through the buffet line. Be realistic – don’t let your eyes be bigger than your stomach. Think seriously about if and how often you will be able to contribute a blog post, including research/prep time. The more contributors there are, the less frequently each contributor needs to post. One post a month is a much easier to stomach than a couple posts every week.

Who is willing to contribute to the blog (if it actually happens)? Tell us about the ideas you would most like to write about, or other ways you would like to participate.

Backreference to other phases of the blog series.

1. Raise the idea on the meta site
2. Define the purpose and scope
3. Recruit contributors (this post ...).
4. Plan a schedule.

Answer 1

Meta-Coordination, and more

I am happy to:

• facilitate the blog for any issues where moderator assistance or intervention is needed, locating the right SE folk or resources, etc. Wherever keeping the blog active requires it, and a moderator assistance can help.
• edit and/or review draft blogs
• write a blog entry occasionally (one every few months or so), if I am given some advance warning of it.... ;-)

Answer 2

One post in a whole month? Less with more contributors? I'm sure I can do that. I'd happily volunteer for coordinating the blog as well, but I think we should have some "blog committee" and a dedicated [private] chatroom where the coordination will take place.

I can think of several things I could easily write about...

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Beta Progress | About Code Review

CR has a very active community, always coming up with events and using the meta site to keep a close eye on beta-progress. I think even after graduation (I can smell it coming, ...or is it just me?), the site stats will remain of high interest and can easily be a recurring blog matter (I don't mean every month, but a quarterly or semi-annual update would be nice). A blog post is more appropriate than a meta post for this. Keep meta for questions that can be answered.

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Top Content | About Reviewing Code

Fight fire with fire. People don't quite get what CR is? Let's show them questions and answers that shine, meta-dissect a cherry-picked existing answer and go about the details of what makes that answer such a great CR answer; do the same for a cherry-picked existing question - identify and expand on the elements of the question that make it such a great CR question.

And/or make a quarterly review of the quarter's top Q&A's, so we have an easy reference at the end of the year for the "Best of CR 2014".

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Current Community Events | About Us

We have a race going on against PCG. We have a bunch of new review challenge posts in the brewer. When Winter Bashes, we bash at it and get teh hatz. Having them on our meta site is great, blogging about it could be interesting, too, and could contribute to draw more attention voters to our beloved site.

Answer 3

I don't think I'd be of much use as a post contributor, but I'd love to proofread, review, and edit submitted posts, and support contributors in any other way. Whether I review crappy code or enlightening blog posts, it's all just another kind of nitpicking constructive criticism.

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I am not sure how other sites manage their blogs, but a meta tag blog-review would be one option. However, I don't think that collaborative writing as suggested by Nobody would be a tremendously good idea: With non-technical texts there is no “right” or “wrong” but at most suggestions that the author can choose to incorporate. A meta-question per post would still be useful as a way to solicit pre-publishing feedback.

Another reason why I dislike collaborative writing is ownership. A post is not only an opportunity to showcase our wonderful community, but also to a chance for the author to advertise him- or herself which gets a lot easier when there is a clear “I wrote this, visit blog.example.com for more insights“ rather than a vague “Users Foo, Bar, and Baz contributed to this post”.

Answer 4

I feel confident enough to write small posts... But I would really like someone to bounce by drafts off from, probably in a separate room, as suggested by @Mat's Mug.

Count me in ;)

Answer 5

I would love to write some blog posts. It could only be on rare occasion though, I'm too busy to do it on a schedule.

I would be more available to edit/review blogs, and that is something I am willing to do as well.

Answer 6

As several people have already said they would like their post reviewed when they write one, why don't we write them together as a community answer for a meta question per blog post?

Several answers could be used to split it into smaller parts that are edited independently (to make conflicts less common).

Answer 7

I would also be happy to write some articles, probably once every few months, but just like Malachi I would need a complete review of the said articles before posting them.

Therefore, I'm really a fan of having a dedicated blog committee to review and validate the articles (we will later find an overly long acronym for the committee to make it sound cool). Ideally, everybody would be able to propose an article to this committee which would then validate it.

We would need an FAQ to answer the common questions about participating to the blog though.

Answer 8

I didn't know SE actually had blogs!
I would be happy to write occasionally and review other people's work.

I really liked the idea of reviewing open-source software.

Also, I like the idea of writing simple How-Tos for more specific/obscure programming issues. Perhaps explaining how to use poorly documented APIs (IXMLDom and ADO for C++ on Windows) or maybe just topics people generally have trouble with.

I've never blogged before, but I am assuming it's like coming up with a piece that you write for a newspaper. Perhaps we could have a queue for blog-post submissions where any Code-Review user (perhaps with Rep restrictions) could submit an article/topic. We would have editors vet the submission and vote on what topic gets posted that month.

Answer 9

I could contribute on an occasional basis. Potential topics:

1. Things I recently learned via CR
2. Why I review other people's code
3. Interesting code/question/technique that was recently posted on CR that deserves deeper dive, more explanation
4. Collection of commonly given advice for C++ code review (doesn't necessarily mean "best" -- just "frequent.")

Answer 10

I would be more than happy to write a blog entry here and there, as long as there are others that will review my blog entry before I post it...lol

Answer 11

I'm willing to blog

I am offering to help a bit every now and then with the blog (like once a month or so).

Things I could do on the blog:

• Trying to attract more users to the site, and trying to make the new ones stay
• Post about learning a new language, and ways that you can learn them (Can be CR related!)
• Highlights of CR questions and answers
• What's going on in our chat room, interesting conversations
• What code I'm working on and how I think while coding and what CR is giving me for this

And probably a bunch of more stuff...

Answer 12

I would be interested in writing for the blog as well.

I think I will particularly talk about [unit-testing] but if I find a nice topic I could also expand on more metaprogramming stuff like code generation/reflection and how it might solve common problems or writing your own diagnostic tools for code.

Answer 13

I would like to chip in as well for both reviewing posts and writing the occasional one.

In terms of what I would write about, I would probably steer towards doing some form of deep dive. So take an interesting question from the last x days and review it in depth, explaining why it's better to do x rather than y (note: this wouldn't be an actual review, more like a review of a review).