11–20 of 138 posts
There's about 190* of us HN'ers in the #startups channel right now. http://ircstartups.pbworks.com/ *Maybe we're not all HN'ers, but darn close.
Whatever 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.
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.
Freenode. If you're into perl, they have an IRC server of their own.
I have been working remotely for the past year or so and we use it to keep the team in touch with one another.
Whatever 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 does not, however, alert me in any way as to whether somebody's tried to contact me or not - so it only gets my attention when I want it to, usually because I'm thinking about something and can type responses on autopilot while I do.
There's about 190* of us HN'ers in the #startups channel right now. http://ircstartups.pbworks.com/ *Maybe we're not all HN'ers, but darn close.
how many are active? IRC is usually full of many decent sized rooms with limited chat and mostly inactive users
It does seem creepy. Our company's salespeople laugh at the programmers because we really love to gather in one physical room, then sit silently next to each other typing on laptops and communicating largely via Jabber chat and IRC, even though we are two feet away from each other. If you've never tried to concentrate on programming this seems like alien behavior, but it actually makes a lot of sense, for the same reason that it makes sense for all the Drupal devs to sit in one IRC channel but almost never speak.
If you crave more chat, join more channels in parallel.
I use IRC all day long. Every day. Freenode. If you're into perl, they have an IRC server of their own. I have been working remotely for the past year or so and we use it to keep the team in touch with one another.
Whatever 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.