IRC and CakePHP
Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008So I have recently jumped into CakePHP development with both feet. There is definitely a learning curve, and I’m often tempted to just do things by hand as I’ve done it in the past. Why spend 4 hours looking for a solution for a very simple problem where if I produce the HTML myself it would take no more than 3 minutes? But I’m committing to using a framework because from everything I have read, this will ease long term development efforts.
I am, however a little disappointed with the documentation. As a newbie, I shouldn’t have to dig around message boards and newsgroups to find out how to use their MVC to produce a view’s related select field. Google made it clear that I was not the only one to hit this wall when getting acquainted with the framework, though nowhere in any of the threads I read was the solution.
Enter Greg’s brilliant idea of IRC. I hadn’t been on there since college when I trying to compile Linux. But there it was, a #cakephp group on irc.freenode.net. I asked my question. No response. Politely clarified my question. No response. Reiterated my question. No response.
It wasn’t until I alluded to the fact that I was about to abandon CakePHP that any of the hundred or so people in the room decided to hear my question. Then I got called out for “threatening” them. But at least I did get the help I needed, from someone called liquidIce.
Having received the help I needed, I thanked them, and let them know it was now more likely I would stick with Cake. To which one responded “I was afraid of that”. Real supportive community you’ve got there. This is a problem I’ve read about before in open source communities; new users are looked down upon and condescended to simply due to their inexperience with a system. How can you expect to build your community when new users are shunned?