Flowcoder
Team Members
- trevorturk
- Scott McMillin
- gbuesing
What
Flowcoder: An Evolution of the Code Snippet Site
Flowcoder has what you would expect from a code snippet side: multiple language support, raw code view, and support for embedding on other sites. What was missing for us and what we really wanted was a site that featured not just the code, but the people creating the code. Just as we glean interesting tidbits about people's lives from Twitter, we wanted to learn from our favorite coders by being able to follow the kind of code snippets they create. We wanted to share our own code snippets and have others refactoring them: to fix, optimize, and make them better, and learn in the process. And we wanted to be kept informed: when your code is refactored on Flowcoder, you'll see an @reply from @flowcoderbot with some information and a link. This closes the loop in a casual, low bandwidth fashion and highlights the advantage of using Twitter as both an identity and notification system.
Where
- Entry URL:
- http://flowcoder.com
How
Albino
Ezcrypto
Faker
Haml
HTTParty
jQuery
jQuery-Colorbox
Machinist
Oauth
Open4
Populator
Pygments
Ruby-hmac
Uberkit
Will Paginate
Photo of Barbara, our secretary, who's game for key parties and will meet you in the conversation pit
Comments
@Zach – we do have a feature to find and follow people that you follow on Twitter (it’s behind the “Find coders to follow” link in the right-hand bar.)
We figure there will be people that you want to follow on Flowcoder that you wouldn’t want to follow on Twitter, and vice versa, thus necessitating keeping separate followings for Flowcoder.
Interesting concept but yet another social network site. If it’s through Twitter, I don’t get why I should have a different set of followers? That seems redundant. Although I like the idea, I think Gist could easily be extended to do this.
Ouch, sorry for the big type, forgot to put a LF after my h1.
RE: TWITTER LOGIN PROBLEMS
Unfortunately the Twitter integration has been spotty the past 2 days (I’ve heard from other Rumble teams that this has impacted their apps, as well), so if you receive an exception on login, it’s something with Twitter’s OAuth integration (looks like mostly 408 timeouts). Refreshing a couple times sometimes seems to work, but its’ definitely spotty. Ahh, the trevails of working with Twitter! We actually had no problem all weekend, but it just goes to show that you can’t rely on external services and need to catch those exceptions as best you can.
Thanks for the feedback!
Thanks for the comments — we’ve got lots of feature ideas, but couldn’t fit them in by the time Sunday evening rolled around (diff support for refactorings is a big one). Please let us know if you think of anything else!
Just want to let know this is my favorite.
Although there is still some work to do.
Very nice to see twitter integration here. I wanted to refactor a piece of code and it quickly allowed me to login without much delay.
You guys have also done a great job on the UI, really simple and straight-forward. I will definitely be using this service for myself.
Excellent job.
I’m digging the retro design groove, though I wish it were more integrated throughout the site – right now, it feels like it just in the header and color scheme. That aside, the design and UI are clean, but there are some issues with navigation (no obvious way to move from section to section other than bouncing back up to the homepage), and there are some placeholders that don’t need to be there (in the language list, for instance, you don’t need to show all the languages that don’t have entries yet). The preview lightbox could also use some work – it pulls in syntax highlighting, but otherwise looks like it was thrown together too quickly.
I think you’re on the right track towards a complete application, but you’re not quite there. The error pages aren’t customized (which is a small point, but it’s important), and my attempts to login from the homepage via Twitter failed. I was, however, able to log in from the “Post some code” link. I can also think of other features that might be useful, but there’s no sign of them – diffs from the original for refactorings, for instance.
I like that you’ve taken the pastie/gist concept a little bit further, but at the moment it just doesn’t feel different enough (or enough of an improvement) over existing solutions to rate very highly on the innovation scale. I think there’s potential, but it’s too unrealized at the moment.
The prevalence of gist and pastie prove that apps of this sort are very useful, and pulling in refactorings directly (as opposed to opaque forks on gist, for instance) make this a very interesting evolution of the form. I look forward to seeing how it continues to grow over time.
Good job!