This idea has been floating around my head for a few months now, but I'm wondering if it is at all worthwhile.
What do you think of an online community for software devs, architects, sys admins... really any type of IT role with the focus of the community around mistakes made and lessons learned? The tentative name floating around my head is MediocreDev.
I was at work a couple months ago talking shop with some of my more senior engineer colleagues, and they had so many hilarious horror stories about seemingly innocuous coding errors and erroneous system configs that had disastrous effects when deployed into production. I realized that not only were these stories very entertaining, but they were also pretty informative. They learned many lessons from these mistakes and were now imparting that knowledge to me so that I would not repeat the same mistakes that they had already made in the past. Of course, being engineers, we had good debate about possible solutions and remedies to these mistakes, resulting in good dialog about best practices as it related to those mistakes.
After this discussion, I thought it would be kinda cool to turn this interaction into a website. I mean, every person in IT has made or seen at least a few mistakes during their career that had a negative net effect, whether it be on business operations, product development, or whatever. We should be sharing these stories with each other to help make each other better engineers. If enough users use the community, it could potentially even turn into sort of a best practices platform that other IT people can search just to get perspective around a particular technology or strategy before they attempt it. Pie in the sky stuff I know, but I do see some value in engineers sharing this kind of information with each other.
I haven't attempted to start building this idea for a couple reasons:
1) Time: I just haven't had time to sit down and try to plan how to build this
2) Validation: I'm not sure if this is something other IT people would even be interested in using.
3) Motivation: I'm not super excited about attempting to build an online community. Mainly because I don't think I'd have the patience necessary to build up the community. That being said, if this community existed, I would use it. Though I don't think that is enough of a reason to try to build something like an online community.
I was hoping to get some feedback about this idea. Would any of you all use an online community like this? Do you know of any other online communities already out there similar to this? What would it take to get any of you IT guys and gals to consistently visit and participate in a community like this?
Thanks and stay safe
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