In every industry, there are at least a handful of experts considered authorities on the subject. Most have a blog or website, making them the premier trusted resources industry-wide. You’ll usually find a community where all professionals turn to when they need to converse with like-minded professionals.
The same holds true in the world of development. Developers are such a quirky bunch that no ordinary website will do. We’ve put together this collection of the best developer websites for the latest tech news, networking, project discussion, and troubleshooting. Sites are for beginners to master programming. The list also includes a few fun sites to visit when you need a break from your latest development project.
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Programmer and Developer-Specific News Websites and Communities
Programming Websites for Beginners
General Tech News Websites for Developers
Where do developers turn for up-to-the-minute news impacting the world of programming and development? Here are of the best developer websites for staying on top of programming news specific to developers and programmers.
It’s like Reddit but for developers! Hacker News is the go-to site for developer news related to all the things that might be weighing on your mind at any given time. Case in point: hundreds of developers hopped on to discuss the massive AWS S3 outage on February 28, 2017. Few can appreciate the epic disaster caused by such an outage than your fellow developers.
SlashDot is a huge interactive source about all the latest blog posts and news stories related to technology and coding. It was created in 1997 by Rob “CmdrTaco” Malda but today is owned by BIZX, LLC. With a real community vibe, SlashDot is run by a small group of editors and coders, with the help of the site’s robust community of readers.
It is Reddit for developers! Reddit is the go-to community for discussing the latest development trends, tech news, and everything else on the busy developer’s mind. If you’re needing a quick fix of the day’s hottest developer news, want to discuss a programming issue that’s been weighing on your mind, or need to vent about your latest coding hiccup, Reddit is the site to visit.
Over a million developers belong to DZone, making it a prominent programming news hub for today’s programming professionals and developers. The site covers everything from agile to the cloud, devops, big data, integration, performance, and more. DZone is a valuable source for the latest insights from every corner of the industry.
StackExchange is the platform that brings you StackOverflow (which also happens to be StackExchange’s largest community in the technology category). It’s home to a variety of other communities of interest to programmers and developers. For instance, StackExchange hosts communities dedicated to web applications, WordPress development, Raspberry Pi, game development, and many others. If you’re looking for like-minded professionals and enthusiasts with a shared niche interest, StackExchange is the place to go.
A List Apart is a news source catering to people who make (design and build) websites. With a focus on web standards and best practices, A List Apart is a must-bookmark site for any developer who builds products for the web.
SitePoint is another news publication targeted to web developers. It is a respected source of news, trends, and opinions on all things web design and development. Founded in 1999, SitePoint is self-described as “for web professionals, by web professionals: developers, designers, programmers, product creators and entrepreneurs alike.” Beginners will find plenty of learning resources of interest, as well.
Whether you’re a programming newbie, want to refresh your existing skill set, or have a yearning to acquire a mastery of the hottest coding language du jour, these best developer websites are where you’ll want to be if learning’s on your mind.
MIT Open Courseware makes historical courses straight from MIT professors available to anyone, free of charge. Complete with video lectures, activities, and more, you can’t beat access to free state-of-the-art learning on the fly.
Coursera partners with the world’s leading universities to offer courses on programming languages, computing topics, data science, and more. While the courses aren’t all free, most are affordable and well worth the cost for professional education to advance your career. You can even choose from specialties such as Data Structures and Algorithms, Python for Everybody, Full Stack Web Development, and many more to access groups of closely related courses.
A free and interactive way to learn how to code a number of different languages, Codecademy is committed to providing an engaging, effective learning environment that reshapes the learning experience and allows students to go from beginner to expert at their own pace, entirely online. More than 25 million people are already enhancing their knowledge and skills with Codecademy. Why not you?
tuts+ features tutorials on just about anything related to coding, making it a great site to visit if you’re stuck on a coding project and need a step-by-step guide to working through a problem, installing a particular plugin, or even getting a quick run-through of the fundamentals of a language you’re not already intimately familiar with.
The internet’s leading entity seeks to inspire coders with tutorials and tips. You’ll also find an abundance of other tools and resources ranging from Google’s many consoles for developers (the Google API Console, Google Play Store Developer Console, and others), training, games, videos, and much more.
It’s just like the popular Q&A site Quora, but strictly for developers. StackOverflow is an online community providing learning resources, facilitating a community for knowledge-sharing, and career advancement resources for developers, including job listings.
Get coding tips, tricks, and ideas from an assortment of today’s leading professionals at Smashing Magazine, a magazine founded in 2006 that caters to web designers and developers. For the latest techniques and trends in web development, Smashing Magazine is a must-bookmark site.
Courses, tutorials, forums, and more combine at Scotch.io to provide a top-notch learning community for anyone interested in mastering web development or acquiring new skills. Founded by Chris Sevilleja and Nick Cerminara, Scotch.io offers an impressive array of tutorials encompassing everything from getting started-style guides to in-depth tutorials for complex, specific development functions.
If you need help launching your first website or improving your online presence, be sure to check out Firstsiteguide.com. They have an amazing set of tutorials and guides. Bookmark their site and don’t forget to check back in for news, advice, social media and marketing articles to help you navigate the digital highway.
If you’re looking for a fun way to sharpen your programming skills, Programming Praxis provides enjoyable games to help you pass the idle time in a useful way. It’s very simple, with no leaderboards, scoring, or prizes, offering challenges designed to take about an hour to complete and help you learn a little something along the way.
Formerly Facebook Challenges, Hacker Rank is a learning and competition community just for programmers. Compete against fellow programmers to solve problems, and you might just catch the eye of one of the many hiring engineers who turn to Hacker Rank to source top programming talent.
A hilarious daily webcomic often related to computing created by Randall Munroe, xkcd had a rather humble beginning. Munroe decided to post a few comic-y sketches on a server he was testing out while going through some old notebooks to scan work he didn’t want to lose. BoingBoing linked to his site, and the rest is history.
A fantastic blog about programming and human factors, Coding Horror is a blog started by Jeff Atwood back in 2004. Atwood says the blog has changed his life, serving as a catalyst for many of his dreams to become reality – beginning with landing his dream job at Vertigo Software in 2005 and ultimately founding Stackoverflow in 2008. Atwood has since moved on from Stackoverflow to other ventures, and he documents it all at Coding Horror.
Every developer makes use of source code hosting sites, whether you’re looking for open source projects for inspiration (or to build upon) or want to host your own projects and solicit feedback from other developers. These source code hosting sites are the most widely used and recognized, providing robust communities and a goldmine of source code for today’s developers.
SourceForge offers easy access to all the open source code you’ll ever need. There are millions of downloads every week, thousands of commits and forum posts, and hundreds of bugs tracked, making SourceForge a goldmine for developers looking for inspiration, tools to build powerful software, and a community consisting of millions of other professionals.
No list of websites for developers is complete without a mention of GitHub, one of the most widely used code repositories with projects ranging the full spectrum from the open-source to private collaborations. You can host and manage your code on GitHub, make it public and available for use and comment, gather feedback from other professionals, and experiment with millions of open source projects.
Second only to GitHub in terms of popularity and use, Bitbucket offers unlimited public and private repositories, and it’s free for individuals as well as organizations with five or fewer users. For larger groups, pricing is more than reasonable. Offering “code collaboration on steroids,” Bitbucket offers uninterrupted access and massive scaling for developers who need to collaborate in teams on the next big thing. Oh, and for newbies, Bitbucket offers plenty of tips and tutorials to help you learn Git for free.
When you want to stay on top of the newest business trends, we highly recommend keeping up with the following sites.
Ars Technica is a highly regarded news outlet covering everything from general business and tech to science, policy, gaming and culture, and even cars. So if development isn’t your one true love, you can get your fix with the latest happenings in other areas of interest at Ars Technica.
Another popular news source for tech junkies, The Next Web also has an interesting backstory. It began back in 2006 when its founders Boris and Patrick were in search of the perfect tech event to promote their latest startup. When they couldn’t find a suitable event, they decided to host their own. In that process, they also came to the realization that they needed a platform on which to promote their event, thus The Next Web was born. That platform became a blog and eventually grew into the major tech publication that you know and love today.
TechCrunch is one of the best news publications for learning about the latest and greatest startups, many of which, of course, are made possible only by the complex and often cumbersome work developers put in to build the innovative foundations for today’s tech startups.
BitDegree has a wide range of tutorials, video courses, interactive courses and much more to learn a wide array of tech topics. Including blockchain, programming languages, Data Science, Marketing, and much more! Most of their content is free but they do also offer some inexpensive online courses as well.
If you’re looking for more insider opinions on the best developer websites , check out this Quora thread that provides many others worthy of a mention, or this list of social networks for developers from Web Hosting Review Boards.
We’d love to hear your comments, so tell us what sites we missed from your go-to bookmarks of best developer websites. And while you at it, don’t forget to see how Stackify can help you develop and troubleshoot your application.
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