We’re excited to announce that we are now the proud owners of RefactorMyCode.com. That’s not all, though; we’re also open sourcing the code behind RefactorMyCode! In February, creator Marc-André Cournoyer put out a call for someone to take over management of the site – we answered and now RefactorMyCode is live on Intridea servers.
A Little Background on RefactorMyCode
Refactormycode.com was greeted with enthusiasm by the programming community when it launched in 2007. Too much enthusiasm in fact – the load of over 100,000 visitors from Reddit, Digg and other sites quickly took RefactorMyCode down. It was a good problem to have, though, and a validation for Marc-André Cournoyer that it wasn’t just him and his friends who needed such a tool. He quickly brought the site back up and the people who continued to come back formed the community that still exists today.
How Marc-André Cournoyer Came up with the Idea
Marc-André, a Montreal based programmer, came up with the idea after noticing his friends and other programmers sharing code on their WordPress blogs. Readers would then offer their code refactoring in the comments. WordPress was a poor platform for this – code syntax was crudely formatted and tracking the different solutions posted in the comments was messy. So, Marc-André set out to create a site that loosely followed a blog format, but with properly formatted syntax and a much smoother commenting and sharing process.
Open Sourcing RefactorMyCode
Part of our taking over RefactorMyCode involves open sourcing the site. Once we are done running through the code, we will post the open source version on the Intridea Github account. We expect to have that done by the end of the week; we'll announce it on our twitter account when we do.
If you’ve never visited RefactorMyCode, take a look. Please let us know if you have any questions. A big thanks to Marc-Andre for giving us this opportunity – we're looking forward to the future with RefactorMyCode.
