Programming tutorials have been around on the web from the very early days of the internet. New ones keep coming out all the time because the technology evolves so fast and creates new possibilities. The real challenge is to find the good ones, or those most suitable to you. There are many curated lists of resources for programmers, but most aren’t updated regularly.
Hackr.io is trying to solve this problem through crowdsourcing. Users submit tutorials, which are listed category-wise. They get voted up and down by visitors to the site, so that you can find the most liked tutorials on top in any list. There’s something for everyone, from Ruby on Rails and Google Analytics to popular ones like Python and Android Development.
A seasoned hacker
The man behind Hackr is seasoned web developer Gaurav Gupta, who worked at SlideShare before starting up SquareBoat, which builds websites and mobile apps for startups.
Gupta has a simple rule of thumb to decide whether to upload a submitted tutorial to Hackr. “It could be at a beginner level or at an advanced level, but it has to give a holistic idea about the language, rather than explain a specific concept”. Right now, he’s the only one doing the filtering, but he’s mulling over making this part community-driven, like the upvoting.
But how can you be sure that the best items are necessarily getting upvoted? Won’t some of them be unduly influenced by friends of the tutorial-maker, while others are downvoted by rivals?
Gupta agrees it’s a problem, but one that gets smaller with usage. “Every community-driven site initially faces this challenge of skewed ratings because one user may be louder than the rest, but their voice slowly gets drowned by the overall voice of the community. For Hackr, I think that critical mass is already achieved for at least some categories.”
Right now, Gupta’s focus is on building up the community base and user engagement on Hackr. It’s no surprise, therefore, that his personal favorite tutorial is in the growth hacking section – Paul Willard on Growth Hacking.
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