Top 18 Social Media Resources for Developers

This post is part of Mashable’s Social Media series for developers, highlighting handy tips and resources for software developers. This series is supported by Forum Nokia’s Calling All Innovators competition.

The stereotypical view of a coder is that of an anti-social hacker, sitting alone in a darkened room, banging away on a keyboard by the glow of a monitor (or six) until all hours of the night.  But that's not true to life - today's programmers, developers, and code enthusiasts have fully embraced social media. Whether you have a simple code question or are embarking on a collaborative code project to build your company's next big product, code is best done learning from and working with others.

Social media is an incredible vessel for collaboration, sharing, and information discovery, and there are now many great tools that aid in web and software development. These features and tools are ideal helpers for both advanced app builders or those just starting out with HTML or PHP. The following collaborative tools, resources, and communities can help you develop and finish your project from start to finish. These are only a few of the many great social media resources available to developers, so if you have any others to add, we encourage you to add your favorites in the comments.

Developer tutorial/information communities

1. Stack Overflow: Whenever you're stumped by a programming error or just have a general question about development, Stack Overflow is the place to go. It is a community based on asking your burning questions and getting responses. Voting and reputation help assure quality. Be sure to be detailed when asking your questions - no developer likes trying to form answers with insufficient information.

2. Good-Tutorials: A great tutorial website, Good-Tutorials has a range of different user-generated tutorials in a large number of development and design topics that go as deep as how to create Twitter counters in jQuery. It's definitely comprehensive.

3. Dzone: Dzone is one of the most popular developer link-sharing websites on the web. It's a perfect addition to your RSS feed.

4. Tweako: Tweako is a user-powered programming tutorial and developer social network. There are literally hundreds of how to guides on a plethora of programming subjects. There are even revenue-sharing opportunities.

Social developer communities

5. TopCoder: TopCoder is an example of what social media tools and community can really do. It's a website where engineers and programmers can compete on different development competitions for prizes. The more you code, the more you make - and the more attention you receive. In fact, a strong reputation on the social programming website can often help you land a great job.

6. Hacker News: The development and entrepreneurship community of the YCombinator venture fund, it is thriving with intelligent users and great insights about development topics and the business of web startups. In fact, I'm a regular there.

7. Reddit - Programming: The social news voting website Reddit has a thriving community of developers that discuss programming topics and share great resources, news, and interesting gems.

8. Slashdot: While Slashdot is not a programming-exclusive community, and is not at the pinnacle it once was, it is still a great community for sharing and discussing developer, IT, and programming-related topics.

Social media web tools

9. GitHub: GitHub is one of the best tools around for collaborative and social software development. It's one of the best uses of the Git revision control system around. When you have a team building a product, GitHub's development news feeds, secure repositories, and inline editing are invaluable.

10. Yahoo Pipes: When you're trying to build websites and web tools that require information from social media sources like Digg or Twitter, it's not a bad idea to look to Yahoo Pipes. By combining simple commands, you can create powerful widgets, RSS feeds, and more that incorporate social media data.

11. Launchpad: Launchpad is one of the most useful free solutions on the web for the management of software development. It provides the ability to track bugs, integrates with Bazaar (a revision control system), and has its own community knowledge base called Answers. It's the choice of not only Bazaar, but the massive MySQL open source database project, as well.

12. EtherPad: Etherpad is a very robust collaborative code editor with a free version and several paid ones. It's easy to share code and work together to build the best application possible. If you're looking to share smaller snippets of code, the code library Snipplr and GitHub's Gist are great options as well.

Firefox add-ons

While you can perform web development in almost any browser, Firefox is the most popular choice of the code community because of its open-source, developer-friendly demeanor and its amazingly useful add-ons. I've only included four of the best, but suggest checking out 30+ Firefox Add-ons for Web Developers & Designers and Another 16 Firefox Add-ons For Web Designers for more.

13. Firebug: Perhaps the most useful Firefox extension ever created, Firebug allows any developer to inspect code and even tweak it on-page to see the effect without updating the actual server-level code.

14. Web Developer: The other must-have Firefox extension for programmers is Web Developer, which provides a toolbar and extensive options for parsing code, testing browser code and resolution, and disabling things like page colors and Javascript.

15. Bespin: Bespin is a project from Mozilla Labs that is trying to build a web-based development environment for programming using the Canvas element of HTML5. It's an interesting code editor and an experiment that you just have to try out. Another development experiment to watch is Mozilla Jetpack.

16. Greasemonkey: It is, without doubt, the most dynamic Firefox extension around. On the Greasemonkey platform, you can build and execute simple scripts that will do everything from improve usability for Gmail to add countless features to Twitter. It's a must-have for any developer.

Miscellaneous

17. SourceForge.net: The center for open-source software, SourceForge.net has been an epicenter for finding, building, and sharing open-source projects for years.

18. W3Schools: While not truly social media, there is no better place on the web to learn almost any language for free. It not only has great tutorials, but has a wealth of tools to help you understand how the code works and an active community on its forums.

Mashable’s Social Media series for developers supported by Forum Nokia

Forum Nokia’s Calling All Innovators competition challenges mobile and web application developers to submit best-in-class applications for use on Nokia devices. Winning Apps will be featured in Nokia’s Ovi Store, where consumers will find the best mobile applications and content for their Nokia devices. Total cash and prizes are worth more than $250,000. Deadline for contest submissions is 30 June 2009. Submit Your Winning App Now.

More web development resources from Mashable:

- The Evolution of the Social Media API - 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design - 7 Useful Tools for Web Development Testing - Web Design Toolbox: 130+ New Tools to Make You a Better and Faster Designer - Web Development Toolbox: 120+ New Tools for Web Development

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, karimhesham