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So what? Am I an evangelist? Or a spammer?
During 8 months, beginning on 25th of February, I flooded every two months all accessible Google groups for developers, students and programming languages in Brazil. I did the same with Google+ communities, adding Portugal and Angola since… well I do not sound that much French when I write in Portuguese. Since July, I got impatient and added Ocaml, Go and Lua communities in English. However I had almost no influence outside Brazil: 470 Brazilians out of 500 invited.
Let’s filter the data!
The number of CodinGamers in Brazil grew from about 1500 in February (I was not planning this retrospective, so I did not note the exact number) up to 7000 nowadays. From this point of view only, I did a good job, isn’t it? Excepted that, from the 500 who accepted my invitation, 150 never used the platform, not even ran the sample code for the Onboarding Challenge. We could also discount people who just pressed that button, or did define their nickname, and thus earned 10 points, but never returned. They are 104 in my sample. So? I did not really convert 500 developers to CodinGamers, only half that few.
Platformwise, applying the same filter amounts to some 1250 Brazilians who registered but never used CodinGame, plus some 2100 who never came back. Once more, it seems to be about half the observed population. Is it only Brazil? When checking for the Netherlands, it seems to be around only one third of inactive.
What did I miss?
Maybe my posts did not put enough emphasis about how fun it is to program in the CodinGame environment. Maybe I did not mention that even a bad rank can lead to a good interview for your next job. Maybe I forgot to catch the attention of the classical job portals about the great advantages of having a partnership with CodinGame in order to attract candidates.
For sure, making people really use the CodinGame platform calls for a bit more social relationships than a mere post every two months.
I am happy
It’s almost midnight in Brazil now, and we are 25 online, including people with still only 20 points but with the strong opinion that programming is fun!