Posts Tagged ‘irc’
IRC – A quintessential of software engineering process..
It was Ajay who actually introduced me to IRC world a couple of years back. We used to log into the #nipl channel. At that time, they gave us free linux space for hacking and stuff like that. At that time I din’t realize the importance of IRC. But I knew its a great place where you can get things clarified in a few mins rather than hunting around the WWW for the solution. I used to get lot of my problems solved in IRC. Later on, I used to be in #scheme, #python. Slowly, it became one of my toolbox. In an outsourcing company like S7 Software, where new projects keeps coming in, each in a different domain, IRC is really helpful. I was recently assigned to a Geospatial domain based project for a month and a half. I was basically asked to write a reader for a Geospatial terrain format. The format is considered to be a beast in the Geospatial domain and WWW had very little resources on that. But, there was a very famous open source package called GDAL which implements many Terrain formats in C++. Our team was asked to look into this. While browsing through the GDAL website I came across the IRC channel for GDAL (#gdal). I immediately looked into it. As the project proceeded, I used to log into #gdal, clarify a few of my doubts and get back to the project. It helped me a lot. Infact, without that it would have been very difficult.
Apart from clarifying the doubts, there is a huge potential of learning stuff and also helping others. There used to be tons of arguments going on in IRC channels. I go by the nick – complexity in IRC.
Happy IRC’ing.
:-)
