Programming in a Socially Networked World: the Evolution of the Social Programmer

Social media has changed how software developers collaborate, how they coordinate their work, and where they find information. Social media sites, such as the Question and Answer (Q&A) portal Stack Overflow, fill archives with millions of entries that contribute to what we know about software development, covering a wide range of topics. For today’s software developers, reusable code snippets, introductory usage examples, and pertinent libraries are often just a web search away. In this position paper, we discuss the opportunities and challenges for software developers that rely on web content curated by the crowd, and we envision the future of an industry where individual developers benefit from and contribute to a body of knowledge maintained by the crowd using social media.