Seamless Software — Jumping into the community

Jumping into the community

17 Aug 2012

So, I've been coding in CF for over ten years now, and never once given back. I posted a few comments here or there, but never really gave much beyond that. Just recently I setup this blog to post my thoughts and try to offer any insight that strikes me, but that is still pretty "me centric".

So what am I doing about it? Easy, I subscribed to the StackOverflow feed for CF questions. Now it in my feeds and I process them like the rest. Honestly, it's not that hard, I'm finding most of the questions are not rocket science. Many seem like they are new to CF, or coding in general, some are people needing a better understanding of how certain functions work, and of course there's a fair amount of advanced questions. But even just cherry picking the easy ones, someone out there, who frustrated with CF got an answer a little faster than if I hadn't helped, and made the entire CF community as a whole just a tiny bit happier. We are after all a community right?

Update

I just added a StackOverflow badge to my sidebar. Partially to keep me honest if my reputation isn't improving as I try to help people, and partly as a challenge to you, the reader, I know you have a blog somewhere. I dare you to add a badge and out help me. What? I mean, be even more hgelpful than I am, earn those reputation points faster than I am. I only have 28 as of writing this, that's not so hard to beat is it?

So in short: This is now a game. Help the CF cimmunity as much as you can. I'm winning. Go.

P.S. If you are already helping out, email me your stack badge, and I'll create a leader board.. I think.

Tags: coldfusion, rant

5 responses so far ↓

Jordan

Aug 17, 2012 at 4:33 PM

Thank you for helping the CFML community! That's awesome and I applaud your efforts. Our community needs more with attitudes like yours!

Russ

Aug 18, 2012 at 2:02 AM

put me on your leaderboard! stack profile: http://stackoverflow.com/users/1274817/russ

Peter Boughton

Aug 18, 2012 at 8:26 PM

Welcome. :)

There's already a "leaderboard" at http://stackoverflow.com/tags/coldfusion/topusers - depending on how you measure things, either Henry or Tomalak are top of it. (Looks like you'll easily make it onto the "Last 30 days" list soon though.)

I would possibly say the most useful statistic is rep/answer (i.e. divide first column by second), since that gives you the average score per question (so nullifies the effect of people who've been there nearly four years), but even that's not a great one; it's as much or more an indication of the attention your answers have received, since you can easily get lucky and answer a trivial question with a simple answer and get 15 upvotes, whilst plenty of other times you actually put in some effort and are lucky to get just one or two upvotes (presumably because the answer is too long/complex for most people to determine if they agree with it). Meh.

*shrug*

Oh, here's a link that might be useful:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/railo+or+openbd+or+coldfusion*

The * part expands to show all the CF-prefixed tags, since quite often people will tag as a CF version without including the main "coldfusion" tag, so anyone watching only that wont see those questions (unless/until they are retagged). If you bookmark the * version it automatically updates when new tags appear (e.g. if/when coldfusion-11 is released), which is handy.

(Can also be combined with other tags, like cfwheels or coldbox or whatever, if you want to make sure to see those.)

Anyway, happy answering!

Peter Boughton

Aug 18, 2012 at 8:27 PM

(Hmmm, looks like Mango decided not to include the * with the URL there - make sure you copy the text, rather than clicking the link.)