The state of the REALbasic community
Christian writes of his frustrations with the REALbasic community. Blog post here: http://www.pariahware.com/blog/?p=231
I don’t disagree with his assessment though I do have a few more types to add to his list:
Type 3: The I’m-Too-Busy-To-Think-About-Helping developer. Personally I think this is a cop out. We’re all busy. Volunteer organizations, which ARBP is, is totally dependent upon volunteers. We all have some quick and dirty proof-of-concept code that we could share.
Type 4: The I-Don’t-Care-Because-It’s-Not-My-Responsibility developer. That’s called apathy. For the REALbasic community to succeed more of us need to care and actually do something.
Honestly, this list isn’t much different than any other volunteer organization I’ve belonged to. This includes my college fraternity, several churches and even Habitat for Humanity projects: Most work is done by a very few, highly motivated, people.
Here are the facts. ARBP has been a part-time job for me. In 2009 I’ve tracked all of my time (using Task Timer, of course) and I’ve spent 15% of all my working hours working on ARBP. That’s nearly a day a week that I take a away from paying work. And that doesn’t count the emails that I’ve answered in off hours. Since we don’t get paid that’s tough to justify in the long run.
Any criticism you have of ARBP is okay. You probably have some justification. We’re all volunteers. We need more help. We need more examples in the source code repository. We need more writers. We need more training video’s. We need a Joomla! expert. We need someone to help coordinate next years ARBP Summit. In other words, if you volunteer I guarantee that we can find something for you to do.
The RB community needs you! Help out where you can. Not only will you feel good about sharing your knowledge and experience but you’ll be helping the community out as well.
