Why create another list if there are millions of them on the Internet? To find find useful information which can be sometimes rather difficult as the Internet is full of useless things.

Why another list?

Some new developers have recently joined our team, so we had to give them a list of books and resources where they could find relevant information. We started with the list of books which are a must for a freshman year, the so called “12 months books”. Then goes the list of sites and podcasts for one’s everyday commuting. There are several ways of sharing the list:

a piece of paper a blog post internal wiki a Github repository

Obviously, paper is not an option.

A blog post needs to be kept up to date which is usually done by one person if it is your personal blog.

Wiki is normally supported in companies with 10+ people but the situation is similar to the one with the blog post: if the active person leaves the company wiki goes to rack and ruin.

And here comes Github!

Github has turned from code repository into a social network for many of IT people. Github is a knowledge exchange service.

That’s why it is an ideal tool for our problem, i.e for the exchange of information. Moreover people from the community can join and share their resources. Not to create a huge Wiki we have divided the list into small repositories and joined them into Github organisation. We also added a few administrators responsible for keeping the organisation up to date. Those who have contributed, get a member status and can create their own lists (repositories).

One cannot know everything, and cannot read all the books, so community experience is just what you need. That’s why we decided to share our knowledge with the community in the hope to find mutuality.

Remember that a rubyist is first of all a programmer and then a ruby programmer. Thus the library will expand into different spheres, not only into Ruby and Rails. The main idea is to collect the best resources which can help the person become a highly qualified programmer. The list is still raw but it contains a lot of useful information.

We might be doing something wrong and using Github for the purposes it is not aimed at, but it has provided a perfect solution for our problem. During a few days community members shared books and resource I was not aware of and now they are on my reading list.

Here is the link to the organisation.