By Alex Genadinik
Over the past few years, marketing has been getting more and more technical. If you need to set up a website, you need to learn WordPress and in some cases knowledge of a programming language like PHP and a database such as MySQL. If you need to create social recommendation features beyond simple social bookmarking buttons, you need to learn how to program those features. But you can’t take a whole class just to create a feature that you need to push live tomorrow. You need something that can help you get up to speed quickly. And you are not alone. Despite developing code for many years, I myself get stuck on new issues that come up daily. In this article I will share my go-to resources for programming help when I need to learn a new technology, or get stuck with a technical issue that consumes too much of my time.
WordPress Help. Do you have the wordpress blues? I know I do from time to time. WordPress has many configuration options and they are sometimes very confusing, making it difficult to find settings you need. That can make simple tasks very time consuming and frustrating. An amazing resource to help you get past WordPress challenges is WordPress Answers which is a sister site of StackOverflow.
StackOverflow for Regular Programming Questions. For programmers, StackOverflow has been an absolute godsend from Joel Spolsky who created it. Most programming questions are answered there quickly and for free by brilliant software engineers. So when you get stuck with any programming or database issues that are more involved than just WordPress, StackOverflow is an amazing resource where you can get help. Just make sure you ask your questions clearly explaining the issues you are facing. If you don’t, the administrators there may close your question in an effort to keep the quality of the asked questions at a good level.
Want To Learn More About Some Topic? Are you discovering your inner geek and want to learn more about some topics? There is one site I use for ultimate geeking out. It is called Geek Talk and has videos and articles by well-known developers and CTOs from popular startups explaining how they accomplished various feats. It isn’t a well-known site, but it has great content because the founders focus on tech events in San Francisco and New York to cover tech talks which would otherwise be very difficult to find. The site has content that other sites don’t often have. The site mostly focuses on open source technology which is perfect for learning because there are such passionate communities around these technologies.
Alex Genadinik is a mobile developer. His recent project are the business plan apps which help people plan and start their businesses. Alex holds a B.S in Computer Science from San Jose State University. Please say hello to Alex on Twitter @genadinik and let him know whether the resources mentioned in the article are helpful. And maybe suggest one which may have been omitted.
