What we’re about
What are we about? Helping "newbies". Just what is a "newbie"? Two definitions are use here:
1. The non-traditional definition is someone that has been in the development community for some time (perhaps years or even decades, such as myself) that has come across a new technology and is therefore, by any definition, a "newbie" to that technology.
2. The traditional definition is someone that is new to the development process in general and is looking to ask all those seemingly (to them) "dumb" questions but are afraid to ask because they are perceived as not worth answering because of their simplicity (and yet those answers form the foundation of a good software engineer).
In this day and age, technology is no longer changing on a multi-year basis as it used to. Case in point, Visual Studio used to get updates whenever Windows received an update or every couple of years, whichever was convenient with the occasional service pack coming out to fix the more egregious errors (just look at the current numbering scheme - 2015, 2017, 2019, etc.). Nowadays changes and updates arrive at much shorter intervals, sometimes several updates in a single month and this is just for the dev environment itself, never mind the associated languages (C#, F#, TypeScript, etc.).
In this group we focus on both types of "newbie" - the actual new-to-development folks that are looking for a safe place to ask questions and get instruction and answers to questions concerning the correct methodologies to apply to software engineering (SOLID, micro services, version control, SDLC, etc. and even advanced topics such as Category Theory, encryption, distributed systems engineering, etc.) and those of us that have been developing for "a while" but have come across something new that needs explanation and a place to ask questions.
Looking at the Microsoft stack, we can see that C# is evolving continuously, the entire .NET environment has changed to a yearly release cycle (even numbered releases are termed "LTS" (long term support - a relative thing as "long term support" means just 3 years!) and odd releases are for development of new goodies - see here for details: .net versioning
Having finally gotten a clue and open sourced most everything, Microsoft may now pull on the talents of literal tens of thousands of developers to help them advance their products, .NET not the least of these (go look up "Microsoft" on GitHub, which they now own, to see all the projects that are out there for folks to play with). As a consequence of this new open mindedness, new "toys" (development tools, etc.) come out all the time and thusly every person not directly associated with the development of said new "toy" is a "newbie". These new technologies must be explored and explained, that's what we strive to accomplish in this user group.
