”I have been trying to be more active in the Rails community”, said Curtis Miller in the inaugural episode of Personality Flatline. ”We should all get on some kind of rails forum or ruby forum or whatever it is and try to answer a couple questions.”
I couldn’t agree more.
Participate in Forums / Groups / Channels
Phoenix has a really good number of professional Rails developers with years of experience (that’s a long time for Rails), and we need to make sure that we’re giving back to the community. We need to get out of the habit of visiting forums/IRC only when we need them and get into the habit of frequenting these places to help out others.
I often pop onto the #rubyonrails IRC channel on freenode to ask a quick question and then I pop off. I should auto-login to #rubyonrails and other IRC channels to be there to help answer other peoples’ questions.
Wanna participate? I recommend …
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IRC
- #rubyonrails, #ruby, #merb
- #jquery, #prototype
- #phx.rb (specific to Phoenix)
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Forums / Groups
- Rails Forum, Ruby Forum
- Rails Google Group, Ruby Google Group
- Phoenix Ruby Google Group (specific to Phoenix)
Contribute to Open Source
We also need to make sure that we’re making our open source projects available to the public (ie. putting them on github and we’re contributing back to the open source projects that we use.
Fix a bug in a Rails plugin? Send a patch to the author! Or: fork the project on github, apply your patch, and then send the author a pull request. It’s really easy. And it feels awesome.
This morning, when Marc walked into work at OpenRain, he had a big smile on his face. Over the weekend, he had contributed to a project that github uses to generate webpages. He integrated a WEBrick server so you can easily develop your jekyll-based site, without having to set up a webserver. Although he didn’t get visual credit (someone else committed a similar change), he looked like he was happy to have given back to the community. Coincidentally, I contributed to the same project over the weekend! And I can tell you, from my perspective … it feels awesome.
Blog, Tweet, Bookmark, & Comment
While contibuting to forums and open source projects is truly 1337, don’t underestimate the smaller contributions. Found out about a sweet new RubyGem? Tweet about it! And bookmark it on a social bookmarking site like delicious, or share it via Google Reader. Reading a cool blog post? Write a comment. Thinking of a cool idea? Write a blog post!