Thread

One of the great things about ExpressiongEngine is the community built around it. But I have a question, for you non-Ellis Lab employees who are on the forums a lot: where do you find the time to be so involved? I’ve been around in sort of spurts here and there, but clients always get the best of me. I fade away and get buried in work. It seems like the best way to learn/grow is to really become involved in the community.

I made the mistake a while ago of putting the forums (CodeIgniter & ExpressionEngine) feeds into my live bookmarks.
Now like a tick I check them roughly every 37 breaths…. roughly 😉

We build all of our clients sites in CI and EE I am here for hours on end every day anyway….

So to answer your question directly:

where do you find the time to be so involved? I’ve been around in sort of spurts here and there, but clients always get the best of me. I fade away and get buried in work.

To become more involved in the community ensure that the work you get buried under is EE and CI work 😉

-Lee

Our staff started as community members too, you know.  Before I was hired; I had the time to do this as I was in school, and everyone knows that anything is better than researching for an essay, right?

Actually, while school did leave me some time for my own escapades; I found that the time spent here paid off because teaching others meant that I had to learn aspects of the software I might never otherwise touch or know about.  This allowed me to “Pay it Forward” from all the help I had received in my own learning process.

Plus, the responses and thanks from people was always so rewarding, that it made finding the time to visit really quite a lot easier than tearing oneself away from the forums.

So, I know you wanted non-staff; but you can consider this my pre-staff response. 😉

I’m staff as well, but I had about 4500 posts before becoming a part of the team.

For me, it was fun, and I would reward myself with an hour of quick reading.

Also if you don’t spend some sort of time on the boards, you might miss some cool 3rd party offerings. 😊

ExpressionEngine what’s that? 😉

Yep as Sue says there’s a lot more than meets the eye on the forums. I’m one of those people that likes to check absolutely every single thread going and luckily I have a pretty much photographic memory so if there are any Plugins, Extensions or Modules that anyone needs to know about then I will probably have seen them 😉

It’s just a great place to be too. This has to be the friendliest forum I have ever been in period!

Best wishes,

Mark

😊 Thanks for the comments. I’ll make an effort to be around the forums more often, I’m sure it would be very educational. It’s just a matter of setting time aside to learn from, and contribute to the community. Maybe I should fire all non-ee clients 😊

Maybe I should fire all non-ee clients 😊

You mean those kinds of clients really do exist? I thought that was just a myth 😉

Best wishes,

Mark

haha, I wish. Seems like people are into this Ruby on Rails crap these days… Or maybe I should take the time to learn PHP and use CI 😊

I’m not going to get hurt for saying ruby here am I?

Nah, I think you’re safe!  😉

Or maybe I should take the time to learn PHP and use CI 😊

Sounds like a great idea, but a word of warning up front:  You will not leave EllisLab owned domains for a long time.

At some point refreshing the CI forum just became part of my workflow.  Get up, check CI forum, make coffee, check CI forum, shower, check CI forum, towel off, check… you get the idea.

These forums are merely an extension of that.

... Just added ee forums to my live links and fire all none ee clients, it’s going to be a good weekend.

... Just added ee forums to my live links and fire all none ee clients, it’s going to be a good weekend.

I was only kidding about the non-ExpressionEngine clients. I hope you haven’t done anything you are going to regret 😉

Anyway, welcome to the mottley crew!! 😊

Best wishes,

Mark

Well, I work IT, so I have two modes in my job, overwhelming panic, or waiting for overwhelming panic. So when things aren’t on fire, I spend my time here, banging on my sites, or over on metafilter (this is simplifying things a bit).

I also like to answer as many questions as I can here (which means the easy ones), since I’ve had a lot answered.

I’ve gotten a bit better at figuring out the documentation, so don’t ask as often, but I still ask.

And at night, when I’m not working, that’s when I am usually posting into my various sites.

Honestly, I just pop in every now and then, I don’t have the time to spend hours here 😊

Seriously though, besides the good karma of helping people out I also learn a lot from just hanging out here, be it a new way of doing something with the tags I already know, learning about a new plugin or extension etc…