It’s been almost three years since the birth of Coderplex, and four if you count our freeCodeCamp Hyderabad days. It’s been a very long journey indeed. In this time, we have reached thousands of people in Hyderabad, hosted 1000+ sessions, workshops, events, hackathons and so much more, all with the mission to help our members learn various modern technologies and progress forward in their own careers as software developers and engineers.
One of the core values of our community has always been free, open, always flowing knowledge sharing among our members. It’s only through such a free and open sharing of specialized knowledge that learning and growth of individual developers and the entire ecosystem can be accelerated. It’s genuine, authentic. It shows that you actually, genuinely, want to share your knowledge, help other people learn what you know, and it pushes everyone forward together.
When you setup some form of gates, doors of entry hinged on some type of evaluation, some criteria that people need to meet to access the value you claim to provide, then you build a locked garden that benefits only some privileged sects of our society. And it relatively slows down the group learning, because the knowledge sharing is limited and controlled. There is nothing better in the world than finding an environment that allows you to learn without any conditions, that gives you wisdom free of cost and helps you become aware and make better decisions for absolutely altruistic reasons.
Traditionally this open and free knowledge sharing was happening through our chatrooms, and our chatrooms have been the most active, valuable tech chatrooms in the city as far as we are aware. All the members in our chatroom constantly appreciated how much value they were receiving through those groups just from being a part of it, accessing high quality information, wisdom, and opinions that they never really had access to before. It opened the floodgates of learning for them.
But chatrooms have limitations. Depending on the platform you choose to use, there could be a limit to the number of people who can join the group. We had this problem with our WhatsApp group. The conversation we were having, the information that was freely flowing, was so extraordinarily valuable that it hurt us that more people didn’t have access to this. That’s when we decided to move to Discord back in 2016-17 itself, which didn’t have any group limits, any number of people could join the server. It also had better moderation tools and could have dedicated channels for various topics.
But the biggest challenge with chatrooms is that they become a synchronous form of learning at the group level. On an individual level, they work absolutely great. Someone could leave a message, and you would see it whenever you find time. It will be the last message in the chatroom, will be easy to find and respond to and continue later on. However, with a group of people communicating with each other in a single chatroom, the conversation is always moving forward. It doesn’t stop. And so, to stay up to date with the information, it forces you to be online in the group constantly, consuming the information as it’s shared. If you do not, you are very much likely to miss out on it. And if you try to return later as well, there just might be too many messages for you to catch up on, and in that sea of information, it becomes difficult to find the thing that you don’t even know could be very valuable for you.
So how do you solve this problem? Forums are one solution, where you have dedicated threads for each conversation topic, and it’s segregated in a nice searchable way. But sometimes the knowledge sharing doesn’t always come from a discussion, but rather a single source or person, a single developer/author/expert of the topic who wants to share their knowledge with everyone else. And for this purpose, blogs are one of the best ways to openly share knowledge with everyone.
Text works better than making videos, because it’s so much more intuitive for more people. Videos might require some level of editing, editing text is something everyone who works with a computer knows how to do. We have always wanted to enable the free and open flow of knowledge sharing in a blog format for our community, but it was either never that straightforward and easy or we didn’t really like the options that were available to us. But now we do, with Hashnode!
And so, we have some very exciting news for all of you! All of our community members can now write and publish their tech content to our blog and share it with the rest of the community! You can find our publication here : blog.coderplex.org
We have had multiple members of the community reach out to us about making this happen, and we explored the options available to do this today, and found out that Hashnode is pushing out a new beta feature that allows you to create publications and add authors who can write and publish articles under your page. Hashnode works really well as a blogging platform for tech content, and they make it surprisingly simple to host your blog on your custom domain name. There are many members in our community who maintain their own personal tech blog, and we would love for you to share your content with the rest of the Coderplex Community through our new publication!
If you have any questions regarding publishing your tech content on our blog, you can ask them in our community chatroom .