Community

Future of Coding uses Slack as an internet forum / message board.

We share and discuss ideas, prototypes, and inspirational links, with a friendly tone and an inclusive code of conduct. We also organize meetups and events in cities around the world and online. The community is wonderful, with an eye to half-forgotten history and a head filled with dreams of what could someday be.

Before joining the community, please familiarize yourself with the member handbook. We have our own cultural norms, and this handbook will help you feel at home.

Skimmed the handbook? Great! You’re ready to join the Future of Coding Slack community. (If this link doesn’t work, email admin@futureofcoding.org and we’ll set up a new one.)

Tools

Slack isn’t the best platform for an internet forum, but as the saying goes, you make soup with carrots in your garden. To overcome some deficiencies of Slack, we use the following handy tools.

First, there’s Linen, a service for searching and browsing Slack history. It’s like Slack’s built-in search, but without Slack’s 3-month cutoff.

Next, there’s an entire family of tools created by community member Mariano Guerra:

Newsletter — A once-a-week email of the top-level Slack posts.
History — View discussions within a chosen date range.
Search — An alternative to Linen, with richer info in the search results. Click the date on a message to view it in context.
Links — Every link that’s ever been shared.
People — A directory of community members, with links to their personal websites or social profiles. Not exhaustive.

Here’s a tool by community member Kartik Agaram:

Archives — Index pages that load the full history of any channel all on one page. As a bonus, to quickly pull up the #introduce-yourself post for any member, use this bookmarklet or format a link like this: http://akkartik.name/archives/foc/introduce-yourself/Kartik-Agaram.html

Matrix Bridge

Our 4 most popular channels are bridged to Matrix rooms. They should be accessible in any Matrix client using the following aliases:

You can also search for “Future of Coding” in a Matrix client to find them. Note that these Matrix bridged rooms are currently invite-only as a spam prevention measure. If you would like to join, please DM @jryans:matrix.org to request an invite. Thanks to J. Ryan Stinnett for facilitating these rooms, and for suggesting the following etiquette:

When responding to someone, if your Matrix client supports threads, then use that and you’re all set. If your client does not support threads, be sure to use your Matrix client’s “reply” feature, rather than (say) block-quoting manually in Markdown or something. Exact steps will differ per client. For Element on the web, you hover on the message to reply to, an action bar appears on the top right of the message, and you can pick “reply” (the curved arrow icon) from there and type your reply. For the Element apps on iOS and Android, you long press on the message to reply to, and then you can choose “reply” from the menu and type your reply.