There are a ton of very active programming related channels, mostly for open source projects. It's quickly replacing freenode as the place to go to chat about

There are a ton of very active programming related channels, mostly for open source projects. It's quickly replacing freenode as the place to go to chat about projects (love it or hate it). In fact, it's markdown support for code blocks is unmatched (imo and compared to Slack/Teams/etc) and is actually very nice to use as a place to discuss programming.