codetag - Tumblr blog

[codetag]

Codetag Quests

Be part of an interesting history while you improve your programming skills.

Its been a good year the 2012 we have learnt a lot,  we have made many tests with our users, and we have dig deep into ourselves to find what we really want, and we have come to a simple yet powerful lesson, 

We code for fun

And this means that everything we do for Codetag and want to give to our users should be fun, no hiring, no spam, we want to compete against ourselves, and against many other developers to improve our programming skills, and to do so in a fun way we have created the Quests, which are small tasks, given to our players so that they can learn, improve and have fun all at the very same time.

Theses quests are created inside a history that players reveal as they progress, for now all the quests are being created by ourselves and also are being review by our team, but we want more developers to get involved not only in being part of the game but also being active part of the history and the building of new quests and features.

We really hope you like our new feature, but since its a breakdown in how we were calculating the score we have decided to start over all the scoring, we are going to create some quests that will be linked to your github work and contributions but for now all previous score in any skill in codetag have been droped to zero(0).

We tried hard to find and algorithm that would allow us to measure and compare developers but we have found that there is none, lines of code, code complexity, use of libraries, forks, starts, etc all too relative, so instead of trying to find a pattern to find who is or who is not a good developer, we have decide to find a place where people like us can come and have fun while they do what they love, coding.

[codetag]

Les deseamos Felices Fiestas!

[codetag]

"No one can remove you from my heart"

[codetag]

Codetag version released

We are very excited by announcing the new release of Codetag, we had in mind all your feedback and behold the results:

Public profile for each developer (at last!), you can now edit your personal information y social networks as well as your personal website and blog, also you can remark your most valuable skills, teams and projects you have been involved in.

Recommendations for improving your programming skills by collaborating with open-source projects (we are convinced that your learn how to code by coding)

Rankings:

  - Rankings for countries:  for each one of the countries represented by the developers in Codetag   - Ranking by Country: ranking for the developers in a given country.   - Rankings for projects: classification of all projects in Codetag.   - Ranking by project: ranking for the developers who work in a given project.   - Ranking for organizations: classification of all organization in Codetag.   - Ranking by organization: classification for collaborators in a given organization or team in Github.  - Global ranking: classification without limits.

Recent events: everything related to you, who has compared with you, who are the new users and what are your new unlocked skills.

Invitations: you will be able to invite friends and collaborators to join Codetag y show how amazing are their skills.

Comparisons: you can choose another developer and compare your skills in a certain technology against each other.

Inactive users: if you want to compare yourself against another programmer who is not part of Codetag yet, or if you just want to know how well ranked is he in Codetag, you can do it by entering his Github username at the end of the this URL http://codetag.me/user/<awesomeDeveloper>

Performance: from now on you won't have to wait several minutes to know your ranking position on a given technology since we are cutting down the time for analyzing your code by more than 80%.

StackOverflow: finally we have included the possibility of adding your StackOverflow account, thus you can earn more points for all the questions answered.

We are still working really hard to achieve and objective measure and close to reality. With that in mind, we have released a blog where you can participate giving us your opinion about what you consider is important when calculate scores for developers.

What are you waiting for joining Codetag and measure your programming skills?

[codetag]

Codetag Score

We are software developers worried about how to become better at our craft and get exposed to awesome projects to work on, but also have fun while doing it, so we decided to create Codetag to do so.

In order to achieve this we decided that first we needed to diagnose our skills, we needed to compare with other developers the best ones so that we knew how far we were from becoming a great one, and we also needed a metric to know our advance in our efforts.

We built a prototyped version of what we want by searching for the best developers in networks we usually use as Github and Stackoverlow and measure their work there in a way that we could also measure ourselves.

This Blog post explain how are we calculating the score and how we plan to improve it, we are eager to receive feedback to find the best way to measure a programmer work in order to advice him on how to get better at what he does.

The Skills

We have created a skill directory which represents everything doable by a programmer, for now we are considering only the knowledge on certain programming language (ex. Javascript, Python, etc), but called skills purposely, because we plan to include many other skills not so related to a specific programming language like Test Driven Development, Communication Skills, Documentation Skills, or even knowleadge on specific frameworks or tools (Ex. Django, Rails, Express or Sublime, Heroku, CI, etc).

The Score

Its extremely difficult to score someones work because it means using and arbitrary measure system, like points, but we needed to start somewhere, so we decided to add points according to the information sources we are using, however we have plans to make the scoring systems something more relative to the whole crowd of users and maybe a probabilistic models, however we are not quite sure on how is that going to work.

Information Sources

We started with public network activity because we believe that programmer that collaborate or expose their work are passionate programmers who love this craft beyond their office time.

For this beta version of our site we included github as a source for open code projects, which will allow us to dig into how are the coding habits of a programmer and how does it look the written code.

We also included Stackoverflow which is the biggest QA place for programming related questions, its every programming bread and butter when dealing learning stuff by exploration, or solving issues.

Github

We are doing an initial analysis of interactions that a programmer have in github

First we collect information from all the repositories the programmer own or have collaborate with (The repositories in the organizations the programmer belong to aswell).

We then go deeper and count all the changes that are attributted to the programmer and score only those changes that mean modifications, we skip whole file additions because most of them are comming from external libraries or code generation systems.

We value each change depending on the repository "value", which is granted by the forks and number of collaborators a repository have, we do this because we believe that is what makes an open source project valuable.

There is a lot more info we can infere from code itself like a linting score or test coverage we are figuring out how to do so.

StackOverflow

These guys  make our lives a lot easier because they alredy have an scoring systems which values someone contribution (http://stackoverflow.com/faq#reputation)

We gather a programmer reputation by task and try to associated to the most suitable skill we have

This Stackoverflow tags opens the door to a wider universe of skills and we have plans to takem into account

We have plans to integrate more services like bitbucket, google code, source forge, quora, twitter, etc, as well as "off-line" information like event participation or organization, conferences, books, articles and many more, we know this is a lot of work but we are open to receive collaboration either in finding the way to integrate this services or specially in defining a measure that developers can trust, if you are interested in collaborate please follow the next link ()

[codetag]

I wanna CODE!!!

[codetag]

We really hate bad spelling!

Share if you hate it too.

[codetag]

Codetag team it's ready!

[codetag]

A video of the work by the winner of our past competition (Javascript Challenge 2012), awesome stuff by @ceronman

[codetag]

Where are the developers in Latam?

We decided to launch Codetag to latin america developer community so they can see how good they are at certain technologies and get some feedback on how to improve their skills, however we first need to find them, if you are a developer you could help us by telling us, where do you usually spend your time (online and offline)?, how do you colaborate/socialize with other developers?