Community plays an essential role in a developers life and so does a developer. As developers there will be scenarios where we need to connect with peers, people in communities (online and offline) and sometimes strangers over the interweb. There will be several reasons why you will have to take time from your work and get out there and communicate with people. You might be facing a problem and searching for a solution or you are just a kind soul who wants to help others. Maybe you want to share your product or research with the community.
A developer can join a community, share her bit to it. Take help from the community members, help peers in need and in time herself as an individual. A developers has many platform that she can join and represent in a community. There are online forums, groups, mailing-lists, IRC channels, or social channels like Twitter, Facebook, etc which a developer can join at the convience of her workplace. Apart from this there are social avenues, where she can meet people at meetups, hackathons, seminars or workshops.
To join a community you can sign up and start interacting. However there are few things to keep in mind, community is based of people and people have feelings. The golden rule to be a strong member of a community is to respect others opinions. Its fine to have a personal preference but bindly rejecting something won't get you a warm response.
Before you go sign up on a forum like StackOverflow and start posting questions, search around for your queries first. Chances are someone with a same problem would have posted a similar question and might have got a solution for it.
If you are facing a unique problem and can't find a solution then make use of these platforms. There are certain criteria and guidelines you must follow to get your question clearly to the person reading and get a to the point answer.
- Try to communicate in a fashion that everyone can understand you. Be specific so that you get a specific answer.
- Make sure the title of the issues is reflective of content
- Write down all the steps to replicate the problem
- Do mention the hardware and software you are facing the problem on.
- Use code blocks instead of plain text
- Keep an open mind as the answer you get to your question might not always be what you are looking for.
Even when contributing to the community, a developer has to take some measures and make some efforts so that her contribution has a maximum outreach. A well maintained and upto date project will attract people who will help fix, improve and extend it.
- Follow the guideline of the website you are posting to
- Write a proper documentation highlighting the how-to's, functionality, fixes, etc
- Write about how the project you are pushing out is being used
"Acknowledge and embrace unpredictability. Think and behave in a future-friendly way. Help others do the same."