Earlier this month, I began this blog and additionally started a mission to contribute to all of the great communities that have helped make my professional life a bit easier. Everything has been going better than I could have imagined and I never thought that I would have been having so much fun doing so.
The Community
After a few days of bouncing around from different forums across the web, I finally settled in on the ASP.NET Forums to be my base of operations. I found it very easy to navigate and it was just popular enough to not feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of questions, discussions and breadth of topics covered (unlike the MSDN Forums and Stack Overflow can occasionally be).
The community at ASP.NET could not be better. The community ranges from those just getting started in the .NET world to perennial Microsoft MVPs and a bevy of Microsoft employees as well. The folks at Neudesic have done a great job working with Microsoft on the forums and are always willing to answer questions and discuss possibly improvements to the site itself. The forums are well moderated by very knowledgeable people that are actually experts in the areas that they moderate.
The only problem that I can even think of when it comes to the forum is that I cannot seem to get away from it.
I've been doing my best to keep up my resolution to contribute as much as possible and try to provide quality assistance and explanations to those that need it. The whole experience so far has been more enjoyable and I have learned far more than I thought would have been possible and I hope to keep the trend going for as long as I possibly can.
I've set a few very ambitious goals for myself on the forums to see what I can accomplish within a year, but I am confident that even if I don't reach those I will still have helped a great deal of people. I still try to hop on over to Stack Overflow whenever I can, however it's on the back-burner for now. Regardless, I'm sure that any contribution at all is better than none and as long as I am helping out someone in some way, then I am good with that.
The Blog
I've enjoyed the whole blogging aspect more than I thought I would as well and I can see why all of those prolific developer bloggers out there are doing what they are doing. I probably have around 10 different drafts of posts already on this blog and I hop on occasionally to post little snippets of topics that I would like to cover to remind myself. It's still taking a while to get used to, but I'm having fun and hopefully a few people out there might actually read it.
Back to the Forums
The itching is starting to return, which my body is telling me that it needs its fix. But at least this addiction is a positive one, dedicating to actually giving back and assisting people as there are far less productive things that I could be doing with my time like Reddit.