In a previous life I did a lot of coding and extending other people’s code, which means i spent a lot of time communicating with entities who generate code: from partner companies with APIs, to vendors with proprietary libraries, to distributed open source projects whose work we mangled and remixed. Every entity has a philosophy about how they treat developers. And believe me: as a developer, whether that philosophy is stated publicly or not, you know right away how someone feels about you using their code; for example, sometimes no answer can speak louder than words — most people will interpret silence as, “we don’t care about your issue”. As David Carson famously said, “You can’t not communicate” (meaning everything you do sends a message).

Without further ado, here is a short listing of some good, bad, and indifferent developer programs, with short notes on each. They might help you in building or refining your own developer outreach effort.

Some Nice Developer Programs:

Adiumx - the OS X protocol-agnostic chat program. Adium does a nice job of tying their bug-tracking with their wiki documentation (something Trac makes trivial) as well as creating a very pretty showcase for plugins.

Openbsd - as long as your questions are sincere and well-researched, it’s easy to get good answers from the top-dog developers

VLC, the open source media player - documentation a bit scant, but answers come quickly via the IRC channel — they even provide an IRC web interface to jump right in and start chatting/lurking without opening an IRC program — brilliant.

Monotone, a version control system - their “want to help? join irc, pick a quickie or claim a bug, write a missing test case… we’re friendly” is a great introduction

Interwoven’s DevNet - IWOV has outsourced almost all their support to the developer community and created incentives for developers to share knowledge and amass social currency. They definitely “Get it.”

the venerable CPAN - pretty oldschool; no strong “community” features, but a very straightforward organization system for code that never changes — always easy to find things. few programs are this consistent.

…and some not-so-great ones

Danger’s hiptop developer site - not terrible, but they constantly move things around (new wiki, new irc channel, etc)

Mobile Processing’s forums (fora?) - a great product, but only one person doing ALL the support

the OLPC mailing lists - creates an impression that the group is completely disinterested in growing or fostering a strong development community

Sourceforge - one of the originals. confusing to navigate, just makes it too hard to host your project or communicate with your coders.

Developer Program Juice:

CIA an ambient activity display. pre-Trac, this was the coolest thing ever - just a big user maintained leaderboard for open-source projects. Like sourceforge’s “activity” metric, but less geeky.

Advogato - like a social network for developers. a great idea (social certification for coders) that all developer programs should be integrating with.

Mashery - an API manager with stats, access control, etc.; think FeedBurner for your APIs

I’ve also belonged to a lot of big-iron, closed-source dev-comm programs like IBM and Vignette, but they weren’t particularly memorable. I’ve heard great things about MSFT’s developer program, especially about their documentation, but I can’t speak to that personally.

Special thanks to pheezy for clueing me in re: his own experiences with danger, mobile processing, and openbsd.

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