I was having a conversation with someone on Proggit about a system (webapp?) whereby programmers would submit ideas for small projects (1-2 hours) with the specific goal of meeting others by working on those.<p>I know, of course, that you can work on open source projects (or startups! :P ), but this usually requires a larger investment of time. I also know of:<p>1) The "Six hour startup" project, for first-world meetups in the Seattle area<p>2) http://justhackit.slinkset.com/ (which I heard about on HN)<p>But the first one is a model for real-world meetups only, and the second one doesn't seem to have much momentum, and seems more designed towards one-time projects for which you're seeking a partner or two. I'm more specifically speaking of something which would propose new, small projects rather regularly.<p>Have you heard of something similar? Here's the thread on Reddit for more details of our ideas:<p>http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7shvy/q_is_there_a_good_site_for_complementary_skills/c07a5hg
Real world meetups for joint hacking are better than online collaboration. If the goal is to learn from other programmers, you learn a lot more by sitting next to them. A lot of it is incidental stuff you would not have thought to ask, like tricks in vi and emacs and etc. Another reason to work with someone is it provides a kind of social discipline, you feel you have to get something done on the project on a semi-regular basis. A weekly hacking session at a coffeehouse or someones apartment provides that regular discipline, and because the hacking sessions inevitably end, physical meetings can keep a side project from growing and taking over the rest of your life.<p>The "just work on a open-source project" advice isn't that bad, but you should pick something that you would benefit from improving. It is still a good idea to solict others to help you in a physical meeting, however. Find people who would benefit from improvement in the same project.<p>I think rather than a website or webapp, what you are looking for is a computer club. I go to a weekly meeting in Austin of ALE, a linux users group. We meet 7 pm to 11:30 pm, and we are an "experimental" group, in that we never have presentations or a planned agenda -- people bring computers with problems and we fix them, new people show up asking for help learning linux, etc. There are about 5 people there who come regularly with programming issues, ranging from side-business startup sites that are in php and mysql to hobbiest robots.<p>If you are really serious about this, find a place (possibly your house or apartment) and have a "Saturday afternoon hack-a-thon" every week or every other week. If you provide food and coffee people will come. Your main problem is likely to be keeping non-programmers from showing up and just talking.<p>If you have trouble finding a place to do this, see if you can locate a co-working or "jelly" type place in your area. A co-working place might let you use the area during non-business hour such as on weekends, and the jelly people probably know all the good coffeehouses.
I think this is an interesting idea.<p>I decided to throw together a quick-and-dirty webapp for this purpose, inspired by an HN post (<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=426127" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=426127</a>). I'm taking a little detour & learning Python & Django along the way. I'll submit it here when I have a reasonable prototype ready, maybe in a week or two.
I tried proposing a nearly identical idea a few months ago on here or the irc channel, and it was generally not favored. People argued that if you just wanted to code, join an open source project.<p>If anything of sorts gets off the ground, I'd be totally interested.
could you give an example of what you mean by a small programming project? Also how would you choose who you work with or would it be like playing yahoo games where you can "sit" and "stand up" from projects? Maybe you could also watch people coding/conversing as an observer? Would there be a web ide or an automatically generated svn repository? Would all the projects be unique/for charity or more on a project euler/code golf level or what?
We found a great project to test working together was a todo list. There are many questions and paths you could take, and it seems to be a good project to determine if you can get on the same page together.