The internet is vast with resources. With the assistance of Google, Bing or any other search engine, you can quickly find solutions to even the weirdest problems. One of the invaluable tools I've come across is Twitter. Invaluable because it allows me to keep in touch with my CFML peers. Pittsburgh isn't exactly known for being a hotbed of ColdFusion developers (there are some of us here, but the exact numbers are unknown).
Now, you may be thinking, bah, twitter is a waste of time. Just a bunch of noise. Perhaps. Perhaps it's not. I present the following as evidence that it's not.
Non CFML related goodness:
Scan through those links and you'll find a couple of things:
- Relevant News
- People talking about problems
- People talking about solutions
- And, of course, there's always going to be junk spewed forth by bots, spammers, etc.
Also, Twitter recently came out with the concept of "lists" so you can tag people and put them in a list. I have a lot of CFML developers tagged in a list. Everyone on the Railo team is tagged as well (or, if you want it broken down further Railo Technologies and Volunteers). So, Twitter is good. Twitter can also bad at times. You sometimes have to weed out the junk to get to the good, but in my experience, people tend to be focused and respectful. Sometimes you'll get a big political / religious / opinionated debate between Twitter friends, but I either ignore it or watch from the side lines. If anything, you get to know your community a little better than you anticipated.
As a community manager for Railo, I tend to look out for new people talking about Railo and offer assistance. The one time I did assist someone, I got told via email later that I just proved to his boss that Twitter is a good thing because I was able to provide real time help just from a vague question on Twitter. I consider that a major win for the community.
So, before you block Twitter or dismiss it as useless garbage. Try it out for yourself. Go ahead and follow some lists from above and more importantly get involved and talk to people. The more we communicate about issues the faster we can get suggestions and resolutions.
Tweet tweet.