Wednesday, December 28, 2011

It was Dec 2010. We had an idea of Q/A website for Nepali developers & programming professionals.
This is how we at Semicolon Developers initially talked about the presence of the site:

developers_npl

we thought an online community of developers from nepal is lacking. further, we developers and technology enthusiasts from around can dwell in discussion under a single website, the discussions there would be sure “worth” conveying.

this website idea is simple, you ask questions, you get answers. if you know answers to the questions in the site, answer them. that’s it.

More at : Semicolon d2d

Killing it was a tough decision. At the start, customizing Q/A engine was a tough work too, but we were in the idea phase and excitement was more. But now, its no more exciting. It is no more exciting that the idea which we thought would work, didn’t. Thanks all of you who tried developersnepal.com, your support has always motivated us and will.

Lessons:

SEO – for those from Nepal who Google. Content was original but far less to be tracked by Google bots.
Needs a lot of PR effort.
Be it an experimental idea, it still needs continued effort.
Stackoverflow - a Nepali developer would rather SO than search for a local community of website to contribute/get from. You can’t compete with big giants with just a domain name, sit and watch.
May be we were to early or too late on that idea here in Nepal.

Future:

We would work forever to communicate the fact Kathmandu Valley is one of the most favorable place in the world for IT professionals – daal bhat, gundruk, weather, friendly culture, IT exposure, hard working professionals, self learning computer science grads. That is why we called it Semicolon Valley back in 2008. We call our local community of IT professionals Hackers Chautari and we hosted it under the domain Semicolon Valley, we named it after Hackers News because that is what inspires us every morning, and finally presented the idea at BarCamp Kathmandu, 2011 as the most picked session of the event. We are more focused this time and will work on the idea of uniting truly Nepali IT professionals (those who work for / think about future of IT in Nepal) forever. Currently developersnepal.com redirects to Hackers Chautari discussion forum. If anyone in search of domain developersnepal.com lands at this post, just to let you know that developersnepal.com is on sell. Someone could well execute the idea, we are hopeful !

Got this far ? Please join Hackers Chautari or contribute to Semicolon Valley wiki. We are active there.

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