Research

Used the audience-finding query generator to generate search queries and links.

Note: 30x500 does NOT recommend clicking the # to auto-search the term, but instead, opening a separate tab or window and typing the term into Google to see other possible searches in Google’s autocomplete.

Watering Holes

DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻

Comments are primary source of pain
Permissive to self-promotion
Can send people back to your own site
Can cross-post with rel canonical
Promote your posts sometimes
Mostly newbie audience
Must disclose affiliate links

CodeNewbie Twitter hashtag

Wide open to self-promotion
Very noisy

100DaysOfCode Twitter hashtag

Wide open to self-promotion
Very noisy

CodeNewbie Community 🌱

Comments are primary source of pain
Permissive to self-promotion
Can send people back to your own site
Can cross-post with rel canonical
Promote your posts sometimes
Mostly newbie audience
Must disclose affiliate links

Stack Overflow

All about solving developer pain, but it’s mostly technical pain

GitHub

Repo issues might be a source of developer pain, but it’s mostly technical

WebDeveloper.com Forums

Mostly technical

Quora Web Development questions

Mix of questions
Allows self-promotion, although some replies are modded seemingly randomly

freeCodeCamp Forum

Mix of questions
Mostly newbies

Hacker News

Mostly technical
Not many newbies
Hostile to self-promo
Hard to get traction for links

JavaScript Weekly

Can read on the web
Mostly technical
Not really targeted to newbies

Pointer- A Reading Club For Software Developers

Can read on the web
Nice mix of career and technical
Might be a good place to find partnerships

Subreddits

Reddit’s spam guidelines:

Feel free to post links to your own content (within reason). But if that’s all you ever post, or it always seems to get voted down, take a good hard look in the mirror — you just might be a spammer. A widely used rule of thumb is the 9:1 ratio, i.e. only 1 out of every 10 of your submissions should be your own content.

reddit self promotion wiki

/r/learnprogramming

Mostly technical

Self-promotion policy

It is ok to promote a tutorial or resource as long as it is shared tastefully, is reasonably high quality, and does not cross the line into being spam. Specifically, we expect that:

Your content is high-quality:

Your resource should be technically accurate, polished, and pedagogically sound. Your resource should not “feel spammy”.
Your content is reasonably complete:

Links to incomplete resources or posts that only announce you will be later creating and releasing some content will be removed. It’s ok to post works-in-progress as long as you have a decent portion of it finished and polished to a high level of quality.

Similarly, “Would anybody be interested in a tutorial on X?” or “Can somebody review my first chapter?” type posts will be removed. If you need help figuring out if it would be helpful to create some learning resource or help assessing the baseline quality of your work, you should probably wait until you have more teaching experience before trying to make a new resource.
Your content is specifically about helping beginners learn programming:

Do not post links to resources and tutorials on random tech topics or libraries. If your post is more of interest to programmers in general, it is probably a better fit for /r/programming.
Your content is easy to sample and assess:

For example, if your resource requires the user to purchase something, you must provide a non-trivial free sample so people can assess the quality of your work. The user must be able to view this free sample without needing to sign up or create an account. The free sample should not be just the “introduction” section of your work: it should actually try and teach something substantive.

If your content is free but requires users to create an account to view, we do not consider your work “easy to sample and assess”. You will either need to remove that requirement or provide a free sample users can view without needing to create an account.

In short, people should have a way of assessing the quality of your work before needing to commit to anything.
Your post body contains more then just a link:

Explain what your resource is teaching and how it improves on the status quo. Don’t just drop a link and move on. After all, there are already many excellent tutorials out there: explain why people should use yours.
You disclose your affiliation to the resource:

Don’t play games by pretending you “discovered” some resource. That kind of behavior is highly distasteful.
You respect reddit’s global policies regarding self-promotion and spam:

In particular, we expect you to respect the clause that only 1 out of every 10 of your submissions should be your own content. So if you are a new user, do not begin immediately promoting your content! Participate normally first, either by helping answer questions here or participating elsewhere on reddit. If your posting history is nearly 100% self-promotional, it is likely your post will be removed no matter how good your content actually is.

Reddit’s old guidelines regarding self-promotion contain more detailed tips on how to avoid being labeled as a spammer.

CS Career Questions

Lots of relevant pain

Quartz 4

Explorer

new and aspiring web developer watering holes research project