Rails Exchange - Stack Overflow for Ruby on Rails

Hey everyone,

My name is Kent Fenwick, I am developer over at Viewpointr based in Toronto, Canada.

I really like Stack Overflow and was excited when they launched Stack Exchange as I felt as though the Rails community could benefit from a focused QnA site with the voting and community wiki features of Stack Overflow.

Obviously there are many sites that have tried this, and I am not trying to say that those sites don't add value, but I have never felt as though they manage to serve the community as well as they could.

So I have setup http://rails.stackexchange.com.

It's not finished yet, but I figured I would let everyone know and see what the response is like. I really think that some questions on the mailing list could get filtered over to a site like this and could possibily add more value to the community. I don't know if this will be the case, so consider Rails Exchange to be an experiment to see if this sort of thing could work.

I think one of the most compelling reasons for it would be to keep an updated list of best practices, plugins, gems etc similar to what the guides try and do. The difference here is that we can vote on them, edit them and then commit them to a community wiki. So when you need to figure out what the best Exception Plugin / Gem is, you can go on over to Rails Exchange and see what the community has voted to the top or if it's popular enough, what the community has put in the Community Wiki. I think this will save newbies and experts a lot of time.

Anyway let me know or send me over feedback. Obviously the design / logo will change. I whipped it up in about 5 minutes so don't judge it on that. You can reach me on twitter @kentf or just send me an email at kent at viewpointr dot com. I would be more than happy to make people admins or have some designers take a crack at making it look more beautiful.

All the best everyone,

Take care,

Kent

PS: Thank you to everyone who has ever contributed a single line of code or more to Rails, a plugin, gem or any open source software for that matter, I truly appreciate it.