Honours Project: Hang on

Following my initial ideas i have been doing more research into each of my plans. The more I think about it the more I’m beginning to shy away from my initial primary concept of a streaming video service. The challenges in this project are primarily technical and while the overall social implications of the project are interesting, I’m beginning to think it’s not the direction I want to be taking my research this year.

My reasons for changing aren’t all negatives on the creative streaming side of things. The more thought I put into the ways people share and learn from one another, the more interesting and multifaceted I’m finding the idea of collaborative coding to be. I’ve always found the best learning tool for coding is other people’s code itself, even when undocumented. And in some cases, especially when it’s undocumented. This got me thinking about the services currently available for viewing other people’s code. There is, of course, a plethora of services hosting freely available code to view, use and modify. The thing about these services is that they (Excluding for now tutorial posts/articles) suffer from a lack of searchability. Codepen and jsfiddle are exemplary websites which make sharing small snippets of code incredibly easy but are designed as a means to that end – being an ad hoc service to forums, social networks and Q&A sites such as Stackoverflow rather than being standalone.