Where do you go to connect with other application builders in the salesforce.com ecosystem?
Two years ago, my colleague Pat Patterson (aka @metadaddy) reported on the Salesforce Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel. Given how active this community is, I thought it was worth a redux post to raise awareness again.
As developer evangelists, one of our roles is to stay connected with the developer community. I have to say that one of the best ways I have found to do that these days is through the salesforce IRC channel.
On any given day, there are 20-50 people actively discussing, debating, and in general hashing out all things salesforce.com, whether that is how to incorporate data into a certain report type, whether or not to use declarative or programmatic customizations to solve a problem, or the coolest new feature announced in the release notes.
I’ve mentioned this to a few other developers recently, and the response was something along the lines of “oh, that’s still going on?”
The answer, “yes!”
Rather than reproduce what has already been said, take a moment and review Pat’s post of two years ago for instructions on how to get started in using IRC, deciding which client, and how to connect to the right channel. I promise it will be worth you time as you will be hooking into a network of vast salesforce.com expertise…in fact, if you’re like me, the most difficult thing will be to not get addicted!
Speaking of addictive if you haven’t dived into the Salesforce StackExchange (SSE) Beta site yet, this is another great community to get involved in. I’ve really loved participating in SSE for over a year now, and quite excited by what has been achieved. SSE now has close to 8000 questions, with over 4000 people participating. While there are a few salesforce.com employees involved, the vast majority of the knowledge again comes from many of our community including a number of Force.com MVPs.
Over the past two years, these two facets of the community have developed in tandem, so it is no surprise that you’ll find a number of members who are active in both.
I love how these community-driven endeavors complement the active exchange of information that happens in our developer forums, success community, and Idea Exchange. I may work for salesforce.com, but I go to work every day a part of something much larger that salesforce.com itself: the salesforce.com developer community. You should join in, too!