There have been a few articles published recently on Hacker News that have attempted to describe the complexity of building a web application in the shifting modern landscape. I liken it to building a ship on the ocean, in a storm, out of rotting wood, and while on fire.
So we agree that programming is complex, so what tools are available to coders? The most notable is Stack Overflow.
Stack Overflow (SO) is fucking great. Almost every conceivable programming question has an answer. Jquery on canvas and encountering a mouse event issue in IE8? No prob, SO has you covered. A quick google search resulting in SO links gives a warm feeling inside, like the answers to all the problems are one mouse click away.
The power of SO is in its community of contributors. Coders helping coders; developing skills, and growing the knowledge base. Although SO does a great job of handling simpler problems. I do believe that there is room for a community that tackles more challenging and involved problems.
Where do we go for complex problems? Compression tasks, encoding, pattern recognition, pathfinding, and any other task which a quick google search will not reveal — these problems do not fit the scheme of a SO post and require more time than a charitable coder is likely to give.
I built Funcr to handle complex problems. The key to Funcr is organizing code into a unit that is cross language, a structure that every coder knows innately — a function. Functions are easy to define, have a limited scope of information, and can encapsulate massively complex tasks.
On Funcr, the requester posts a bounty on their function to incentivize coders to solve it (and provide a reward for the time spent). If coders do not find a solution to the posted function by the deadline, the bounty is refunded to the requester. Hard problems require incentive, and the bounty provides that.
Like SO, solved functions on Funcr are public and SEO optimized. Any future coders that encounter the same problem will have a vetted and reusable solution all within one click of a google search. If Funcr is successful in building a community based around functions, it will be an endlessly valuable asset to the field of programming.
If you’re a coder, I’m asking for your assistance in building a community based around functions. Let’s solve harder problems together.