Using social media to study the diversity of example usage among professional developers

Socio-professional websites such as LinkedIn use various mechanisms such as network of colleagues, groups and discussions to assist their users in maintaining their professional network and keeping up with relevant discussions. Software professionals post hundreds of thousands of comments each week in these group discussions regarding technological and methodological aspects of their work. Analyzing these comments enables us, the software community at large, to better understand the state of the practice of many aspects of software development. In this paper we describe a case study in which we use such LinkedIn group discussion to learn about developers'perception of using code examples. We show how the discussion participants' online profile could be used for research purposes and to provide the data with additional context. Our preliminary findings suggest that although many developers advocate the usage of code examples in their work, many of them use examples in a limited way. We also show that some developers oppose using examples altogether. The implications of this work are twofold; we pose research questions and suggest future work both in order to leverage further the tools offered by social media websites, as well as to explore further aspects involved in example usage.