Communities for developers

The official site of the ICPC, the university programming contest where teams of three share one computer for five hours and advance from regional contests towards the World Finals. It is where coaches register teams, where the current regional and World Finals rules are published, and where you find contests, results and past problems.

• DSA
• CS fundamentals

The largest community built around software testing: a free forum called The Club, articles, local meetups, conferences and a job board, plus paid on-demand courses and certificates. A free Basic account is enough to ask questions, read discussions and find events, and it is where many testers learn how the craft works in real teams.

• Career
• Testing

The free Slack workspace of the Write the Docs community, where documentation people ask questions, share work and post jobs. Channels include career advice and a jobs-only channel. A short signup form keeps spam out.

• Career
• Remote work
• Job search

One of the oldest and best-known online game jams, running since 2002. Each event has a solo Compo, where you make everything yourself in 48 hours and share the source, and a more relaxed Jam of 72 hours for teams. Participants rate each other on fun, innovation, theme, graphics and audio.

• Games

The de facto calendar and ranking system for the global Capture the Flag scene, listing upcoming and past competitions, rating teams on performance since 2011, and archiving write-ups from finished events. Useful once you have done a beginner CTF like picoCTF and want to find the next one to join.

• CS fundamentals
• Career

A community of people building profitable online businesses on their own or in small teams, with discussion posts, a product directory where founders share revenue, and case studies. It is the best place to read how small products actually found their first customers, including the ones that failed.

• Career
• Personal branding

The official n8n forum, where users ask and answer questions about workflows, nodes, expressions, self-hosting and errors, and share what they build. Searching it first solves most error messages, and answering questions there is a practical way to build skill and visibility.

• AI
• Career

The October open source event that ran for years as a pull request challenge. For 2026 it is run by Major League Hacking and DEV with DigitalOcean, and reshaped into more than 300 in-person events plus a global online event about building with open source AI, such as open-weight models and agents. Join it for a structured reason to learn and meet builders each October, not for the old pull request count.

• AI
• Open source

The directory and event hub for Google Developer Groups, local developer communities that run talks, workshops, study jams and hackathons, online and in person. It includes GDG on Campus chapters at universities (formerly Google Developer Student Clubs). A practical way for students to meet working engineers, build things with a team and take on an organising role.

• Career

A link aggregator for technology and startup news, run by Y Combinator, where the comments are often more valuable than the article, sometimes including people who built the thing being discussed. It also hosts monthly "Who is hiring?" threads, a genuinely good source of engineering roles, many of them remote. Use it in bounded doses: it is excellent signal mixed with a lot of confident argument.

• Career
• Job search

Sefism's free Discord server, an open chat community for questions about software careers, learning paths, final-year projects and the Sefism libraries of resources, roadmaps and project ideas. It suits students and engineers who prefer quick conversation to long reading, want a second opinion on a course or project scope, or want to stay accountable alongside other people working towards similar goals.

• Career

A Reddit community for software engineers with at least three years of experience, where discussion is about scope, management, difficult teams, promotions and career decisions rather than getting a first job. Less experienced members are limited to a weekly question thread. Useful for mid-level and senior engineers who want answers from people who have been the manager or made the decision.

• Career
• Leadership

DEV (dev.to) is a free community where developers publish articles, tutorials and project write ups, discuss them in comments and follow tags and authors. It runs on Forem, open source software built by DEV's founders, and has partnered with Major League Hacking. A low friction, supportive place to start writing publicly, and a useful if uneven source of practical articles.

• Web
• Frontend
• Career

A podcast, newsletter and community for AI engineers, founded by swyx with co-hosts including Alessio Fanelli. It interviews the people building models, infrastructure, coding tools and agents, with a focus on practical engineering rather than investment or policy. It suits engineers who want to stay current on how AI products are actually built, and it connects to the AI Engineer conference series.

• AI
• Career

A global community for presales, solutions and sales engineers, with a free tier that includes a large Slack, weekly virtual events, a newsletter and a job board dedicated to presales roles. The quickest way to hear how working solutions and sales engineers actually spend their week.

• Career

One of the largest online game jams in the world, run each year by Mark Brown of Game Maker's Toolkit on itch.io. You make a game to a secret theme in about four days, alone or in a team, with any engine, then play and rate other entries. It is a great first jam.

• Career
• Games

Zapier's official community forum, where users and Zapier staff answer questions about Zaps, specific app integrations, Formatter, Paths, Code steps and errors. Searching it solves many problems quickly, and answering questions builds skill and visibility.

• AI
• Career

Make's official forum, where users ask and answer questions about scenarios, mapping, functions, errors and specific app modules, and Make shares news and course updates. Searching it solves many errors quickly, and answering questions builds skill and visibility.

• AI
• Career

An anonymous professional community where accounts are verified with a work email and then detached from it, so employees discuss compensation, levels, layoffs, interviews and company culture frankly. It also offers salary data, offer evaluation and a layoff tracker. It is valuable for benchmarking an offer or researching a team, and worth approaching with caution for career advice and general morale.

• Career
• Job search

A large Reddit community where people starting or already in software careers share interview experiences, timelines, offers and rejections, and ask for advice on job hunting, career changes and workplace problems. It is one of the few public places to see what a hiring process actually looks like right now. It suits anyone calibrating expectations about a company or the job market, read in limited doses.

• Job search
• Career