Raised Eyebrow Blog

I’d been a little skeptical about the idea that anyone can contribute to the Open Source community by giving a little help now and again. This skepticism came from the flaming given for asking ‘newbie’ questions, asking a question in the wrong room or from suffering the raging ego of a well seasoned and highly adored contributor. Today however, I feel much more positive about my ability to give back to Drupal and the Open Source community, and it all came from a simple (or maybe not so simple) thank you. Here’s the story:

Yesterday afternoon, while tearing my hair out over some tricky views problem that I could not find a solution to, I logged in to IRC, which I don’t usually do, to see if I could get some help.

In the #drupal room I asked my question and as usual didn’t receive any replies (which is why I don’t usually log in). It’s a bit of a difficult VIEWS problem and those usually don’t get answered quickly in IRC. While waiting for a response I noticed a question that was similar to mine but not as complex. I took some time (2 minutes) to review the code and I was able to speculate on what the problem was. I posted a proposed solution and it worked. I didn’t really think much of it until later on when I received an email via drupal.org from the person I helped asking me for my e-mail address. I sent it on and this morning I awoke to the email below. Until now I had been wary of devoting my time to hanging around in the IRC channels. This experience has changed my feelings on this quite a bit and I hope to spend a little more of my time in there, when I have it, helping others. In this case, it definitely did pay to help others, but the thank you email was more than enough, it made my day, my week, my month and maybe even my year :) Here’s to contributing more to the community. It doesn’t take much, and just a simple thank you for the help, when given, makes all the difference.

Hi Colin,

Thanks. I am in Fort Smith, NT just on the Alberta/NWT border directly north of Edmonton.
I am a Fire Scientist, I model Wildfire on the landscape. Yesterday I was completing the Drupal Integration part of a multi-year government project, most of us running on little or no sleep and less patience. I CVS updated VIEWS and it became way more strict about the PHP code and broke my drupal. I had been begging for assistance in different irc drupal chats for about 45 mintues when you came along. It really was like saving our team, when the view worked, the entire fire science team cheered. We just wanted to say a real heartfelt thanks.
I am sending you, $20 via email, its a small gesture, as our team knows that $20 will buy a friday case of beer anywhere in canada except north of Norman Wells NWT ;-) Perhaps you can claim to be the first in your office to have been mailed a case of beer by the drupal community – LOL

Tags: Open Source

This entry was written by Colin Calnan on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 at 9:36 am, is filed under Content Management Systems, Drupal, and is tagged as Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.