Living on SMF Island

[codenaught]

Hi all, it has been awhile since I last posted anything to this blog section. I feel like so much has happened since then! There are many things I can't talk about, but I will ask you to trust me that SMF is certainly alive and is brewing up a lot of good stuff for the future. I think the future for SMF is going to be exciting!

One thing I would like to talk about here is what a typical day working with SMF is like for me. I feel my work with SMF has 4 distinct aspects. Aspect number 1, my main priority, is documentation. So what is documentation? Well I won't lie, it is mainly probably exactly what you would imagine it to be, which is writing and editing documents for the Online Manual. But there is a bit more to it then that. For starters, I help maintain the OM. I use the word maintain in the sense of adding new features every once in awhile that the OM might need and to make sure the OM is functioning and is updated. I am working on upgrading the OM to a more recent DE codebase once I can get by the quirks and minor problems I am encountering. If you were lucky enough to be visiting the OM at just the right moment (or unlucky depending on how much you needed the documentation), you may notice some odd things going on at the OM. Such as display issues, things changing with the refresh of a page, parse errors and etc. If you ever notice anything unusual going on, it is probably me at work "messing up" the OM. Please feel free to report any issues you notice, but preferably after waiting awhile to see if it will "fix itself," which essentially means that I or someone else is fixing something that was messed up while playing around with the code. Apart from the OM, my role as Documentation Coordinator also extends to the documentation inside SMF itself. If there is something grammatically incorrect, or something that should be reworded or more detailed, I occasionally make changes to the language used in SMF. I also work on the comments, but I won't lie that I have been slacking with that for awhile. All those // !!! comments should have been filled in by now! 

So that is a good bit of my job at aspect 1. Now the second aspect I will talk about is support. While I wouldn't really consider myself a support guru, I do try to help out from time to time. Support unfortunately can get shorthanded at times, mostly due to the increasing level of support questions being asked. Before anyone ever gets upset about waiting a long time for support, please do remember we are all doing this during our free time and are not getting paid anything to do so. Also please respect the other members of this community by not bumping your support topics before a day has passed and please do not cross post your support questions. It just frustrates the support team and is disrespectful when someone might have answered your question in one topic, and then someone else answers it in another topic not knowing the question was already answered.

But enough with support. Another thing I do is actively communicate with the SMF team. Whether it is personal jokes, or serious discussions involving the future of SMF, I truly take pride in knowing the people behind SMF and love to voice my opinion on matters, even whenever my opinion is of the minority. I think the SMF team itself is a major reason why I continue to be a part of the SMF team. Top that off with the wonderful community! Now I have been to forums where the community wasn't too friendly, but I feel the SMF Community is a place where essentially anyone can really fit in. The community is a group of distinct individuals who have many different ideologies and come from all over the globe, but are able to come together as a whole and help and share and make friends with each other. I love it when I see newcomers to SMF who don't know very much about SMF but attempt anyway, to help others in a way to give back for the help they received or just because they like to help. While I feel like I have helped SMF and the community in many ways, I feel like whatever I have given to the project has been repaid with the amazing experience I have been given from being involved with SMF. With SMF, I feel like I really have a place where I can fit in. I love being able to help others with something I know a lot about.

The final thing I will talk about is coding with SMF. Coding is my passion and I can't at the moment see any career I would rather pursue than to be a Computer Programmer. I feel like I have learned so much from the years of working with the SMF code. Before I was with SMF, I had very minimal PHP and MySQL knowledge but now today, while I wouldn't consider myself an expert, feel like I am learning more and more about these languages. Not just about what does what, but also how to be a efficient at doing algorithms and how to not over-complicate things. I have released a few mods in my time with SMF. You may have known that, but you probably don't know that I have a few mods in development that I hope to publish soon. One of them has been requested a number of times, another is more of a redeveloped/recoded/new interface mod from a mod I wrote a long time ago. I occasionally help approve mods, but nearly always the mods I look at don't meet the guidelines so the process is kind of slow. For mod developers, I want to encourage you all to go over the mod coding guidelines before submitting your mods! It can save you time, and us.

I realize this is getting pretty long and rather cheesy so I will save room with a short closing.

-Insert long live SMF/SMF is great/Thank you everyone line here-

[KGIII]

* KGIII inserts said line for you

It is amazing how rapidly SMF consumes our time. I enjoy it and, well, I know you too much else you surely wouldn't do it.

[Harro]

It is amazing how rapidly SMF consumes our time. I enjoy it

True, and I'm not even a developer or on the support team

[metallica48423]

It is amazing how rapidly SMF consumes our time. I enjoy it

This is so true.  But i think it is time well spent, and well enjoyed.  I've met some great people here (Amacythe, IchBin, KGIII, SleePy, motoko-chan, etc) already, and thats not including already having had the opportunity to chat with other members and see what other communities out there are doing with their boards... very interesting things to see. 

I think im addicted to SMF and simplemachines.org 

[Harro]

I'm spending more time here then on my own forum lately.
Which is actually not so good for my own forum

[KGIII]

I passed the time online at my own forum quite a while back. I will say that, yes, it can have detrimental effects on your own forum. *sighs* Still worth it though.

[metallica48423]

time logged in here: 10 days, 4 minutes.
time logged in at other project:  1 day, 11 hours and 22 minutes.
time logged in at ex-project 1: 2 days, 5 hours and 12 minutes.
time logged in at ex-project 2: 1 days, 11 hours and 2 minutes. (on that iteration of it -- probably around 5 days total)

So yeah... i think i can probably sympathsize with you guys XD

[Harro]

Not so bad for me yet.
On my own forum: 42d 13h 28m (But my comp is always on, and most of the time on my forum as well)
And on this: 9 days, 21 hours and 52 minutes.
But it's only recently that I became so active here

[metallica48423]

this time last month i was at < 2 days logged in.

This time last month i was at < 50 posts

[KGIII]

I am just a bit over 17 days here. 10 on my own.

[Gary]

I've only spent half the time here, that I have on my own forum, and I've got 53 days here.