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Ask HN: Does anyone still use IRC?
21–30 of 138 posts
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone still use IRC?
#22Whatever OSS projects you use have channels on freenode. Keep those open all day and lurk, you'll be amazed how much you learn from osmosis. If someone comes by with an easy question, answer it and you'll have social karma to get help from others when you need it.
You mean you actually keep a chat window open all day long? Isn't that ridiculously distracting? I check my email twice a day, and HN the same. Anything else that could potentially distract me from what I'm doing gets turned off. I couldn't imagine giving random strangers the ability to intrude into my train of thought whenever they wanted.
It's only distracting if you allow it to distract you.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone still use IRC?
#23Whatever OSS projects you use have channels on freenode. Keep those open all day and lurk, you'll be amazed how much you learn from osmosis. If someone comes by with an easy question, answer it and you'll have social karma to get help from others when you need it.
You mean you actually keep a chat window open all day long? Isn't that ridiculously distracting? I check my email twice a day, and HN the same. Anything else that could potentially distract me from what I'm doing gets turned off. I couldn't imagine giving random strangers the ability to intrude into my train of thought whenever they wanted.
Minimize it to the tray.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone still use IRC?
#24I hang out on a private IRC server with about 15 folks, mostly old friends of mine working in various parts of the industry. It's primarily a place to talk about geeky topics and complain about work.
Ditto. We also have a wiki and a tumblr site where we post immature nonsense. We all (except one of us) used to work at the same place, but now we're geographically and employmentologically spread out.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone still use IRC?
#25At my previous workplace, a web devshop, we had a company channel where everyone hanged, even the CEO (when he could). Plus project-channels where we could discuss details of each project, and where we invited clients and partners that used IRC.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone still use IRC?
#26[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone still use IRC?
#27At my previous company we had an IRC room for the devs (and whoever else wanted to join) which had a bot that reported on updates to certain feeds within the company, it was pretty useful and it's not distracting at all. I used irssi+screen, the bot was a Supybot.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone still use IRC?
#28IRC is an indispensable part of my work. The team I'm on uses a private server for team discussions (works great when someone is working remotely), and we also are in a few public channels on freenode. On freenode, I'm in #openstack to talk about cloud object storage infrastructure, #eventlet to learn more about it, and #cloudfiles for Rackspace product-specific questions. #openstack has been pretty active in the last couple of weeks (since we released the code) and has been pretty good for helping people who are learning about the systems. Internally, I can't imagine not using IRC. If I choose to work remotely, or if I'm working odd hours, it becomes a very important tool to keep up with what the other devs are doing.
To stay in the channel when I'm not online, I use an IRC bouncer (znc running on a slice, for me). When I log back in on my computer, I have the conversation I "missed" played back for me. I know other people that use irssi in a screen session to accomplish something similar.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone still use IRC?
#29People with tiling window managers seem to IRC a lot.
too many tiles; have to fill them with something...
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone still use IRC?
#30Of course. Mostly for private communication with friends and with BitlBee gateway. But it seems that many OSS project have freenode channels, that are very active, and not only that. There's very active #haskell channel on freenode, #xmonad, there are various fedora channels, there's an unofficial channel for students of the faculty where I study now, even channels like #lgbtreddit.
I don't see any decline of IRC use in any foreseeable future.