I think the big mistake beginners make is to think that great ideas come from eureka moments from people who have no insight or wisdom from the area that idea draws it's foundation from. It's very unlikely that i'll have a great idea for a car tunning program because i don't even own a car, i don't live in that world, thus all of my views of that world will be biased towards fast and furious or equivalent. The same is true for programming, for you to be able to have ideas, first you must have the knowledge those ideas will rely upon, otherwise it's just masturbation to post on facebook and get a few likes.
Ideas aren't eurekas, that's a huge misconception beginners have. For you to have an eureka moment you must first be knowledgeable enough to allow yourself to ruminate on that knowledge, it's not magic, you won't create anything equivalent to stack overflow or github unless you live in that world. Beginners seem to think it's a random thing that requires no effort, you're just browsing through pornhub and *pop*, a million-dollar idea comes into your head. It's quite the opposite, you put in a lot of effort and that effort might allow you to come up with a great idea.
Yeah I remember thinking "but that's so few characters, who's going to care about that, the whole concept is pointless" but clearly it worked out and it's grown spectacularly.
After the change from Tek Syndicate these forums have also changed from discussing things, just garbage really, to actually talking about interesting topics. I'm in college as a CS undergrad and I would love to have an online community to come to and collaborate/get help on various things. Programming isn't easy and it's hard to learn on your own, at least for me. I learn best with peers also trying to figure it out and having each other explain it to one another.
I think having a Programming specific community for understanding concepts rather than solving problems would be very beneficial, to me as well as many others.
Understanding the concept is actually more important. Many people just care to solve the issue at hand without really understanding the cause of the issue. Anyways, it's interesting, that i talk about programing in general, while everyone else seems to talk about online things like Twitter and stack overflow, etc...
Yup ! I am currently typing up 'Methods to the Madness' and hope to post in about 2 hrs... 'Knights of Python' and intermediate course will come in after we have clearded the basics of python. I will keep adding to Noobs of Python as we move into the harder stuff as well.
We will make sure to keep tagging any tutorial threads. We've been using 'python' and 'tutorial' tags so far, but let us know if you need anything different.
Fyi for those that don't know, you can search for tags in the forum search bar by using hash tags (i.e. #python)