Become A Better Programmer With RefactorMyCode
As any programmer can tell you, there’s more than one way to skin a cat with code. Knowing the best method to use in each situation is part of what separates good programmers from great ones, but how do you learn what’s the best approach?
Ask the web of course. A new site by the name of RefactorMyCode aims to provide programmers with a community forum to not just post code, but also improve it, or refactor it as the code improvement process is known.
RefactorMyCode has a nice clean interface and the process of posting and editing code is somewhat like a combination of the features in a wiki with those in a message board. There are separate sections for Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby, Java, C, C#, C++, Lisp, Bash and even Javascript.
The process of posting is simple, just take a chunk of code you don’t like — perhaps it’s an ugly hack or maybe it has potential vulnerabilities — and throw it up on the site for others to critique and improve upon.
Site members seem pretty active and all the posts I thumbed through had at least one comment and most were threads of back and forth between different users suggesting different approaches.
There was even a welcome lack of “why don’t you do this in language X, it’s better” type of comments.
One thing to note, this isn’t a place to go for finding help writing code when you don’t even know where to start; you could try searching for people who may have solved similar problems, but really, in order to get something out of RefactorMyCode, you’ve got to have at least some code already written. The point isn’t to help you write code, it’s to help you write better code, and that’s good for everyone, even those that will never write a line of code themselves.
If you know of similar sites, be sure to post a URL in the comments below.
[via CyberNetNews]
