MarkItUp

Changing Interests

Categories

• Community

I remember a few years ago I was a total forum junkie.  I had several thousand posts on ASP Messageboard and I was the most active poster on the ASP.NET forums for the first few months.  During that time I was answering questions so that I could learn about new scenarios for coding and using (primarily) ASP.NET.  One thing that always blew me away was that, no matter how much help you gave, the people in these forums would always want more.  You could literally spend a few hours helping someone, even to the point where you basically wrote all of their code for them and they'd still ask for more. 

After a time I became pretty jaded.  Not so much because of the time but also because of the lack of appreciation that people often show for the help that you provide in forums.  Many are the time that you'd pour a few hours into solving some guys business problem with code and, instead of a heartfelt "thankyou", you'd instead get another ream of (often) indecipherable code placed in front of you.

These days I tend to avoid forums altogether.  Most of my learning is done in the serenity of my office and increasingly through my growing participation as a technical reviewer of books on upcoming technologies.  A much more pleasurable way to grow... for now anyways!