Boosting this community

[Chris]

Does anyone think it's time for a boost to this community? I think if that we work together, that we could get this website even more popular. Maybe get some ads in so we could make a kitty for the development of some community projects, who knows, maybe indie resource could become one of those million dollar domain names.

We will need to make a good plan. Which should start with a list of problems the community is currently facing.

Who's up for some work and is willing to take part?

Please discuss some ideas.

My first idea is to set up an indie-resource repository where all the tutorial source codes are in so people can fork them as much as they want and develop them further. Planning before action!

[hallsofvallhalla]

I leave that decision up to the community. I am happy either way. I love the small feel but also would love for it to grow. I will support whatever decision and if we can get a list of things we want to change/fix I will work these next couple weeks on them and/or give Chris or whomever access to do it.

[overras]

A big project from community as "gift" for everyone free on internet. This is what we need . Thousands will know who worked at that project and of course, just here on this forum they will found updates, news about that project etc. A lot of people can do tutorials, but few of them can create something best with them.

[vitinho444]

Yeah we should make a game all together, everyone working on it would take less time and it would kick some ass.

I would love to participate, the time is not much but if the project leader assigns me a mission i will do my best to accomplish.
If we go forward with this, there will be the communication problem. I think we need 10000000% concentration and organization on the project so it doesn't fail We need a leader (*cof* halls *cof* and the *cof* moderators *cof* ).

Count me in

[hallsofvallhalla]

I setup a twitter account @Indie-Resource

Send me yours so I can have IR follow you

[overras]

Yeah we should make a game all together, everyone working on it would take less time and it would kick some booty.

I would love to participate, the time is not much but if the project leader assigns me a mission i will do my best to accomplish.
If we go forward with this, there will be the communication problem. I think we need 10000000% concentration and organization on the project so it doesn't fail We need a leader (*cof* halls *cof* and the *cof* moderators *cof* ).

Count me in

Exactly . This is what we should do, and in my opinion, the only way to realize something BETTER than another projects aleardy created on internet.

P.S: I'm in too ! And Halls, check PM

L.E: Also, I propose to work on our own framework/platform/scripts etc. Just avoid using external things like frameworks (Zend, CodeIgniter etc) because , 50% of our work will be contested with texts like this "You guys are just lucky, without this X and Y this is a failure.." . My opinion not my condition .

But anyway, here is a 95% chance of succes, wtf , halls as organizer ? Will be like playing mario this project for us if we do it together!

[Jackolantern]

L.E: Also, I propose to work on our own framework/platform/scripts etc. Just avoid using external things like frameworks (Zend, CodeIgniter etc) because , 50% of our work will be contested with texts like this "You guys are just lucky, without this X and Y this is a failure.." . My opinion not my condition .

Very few serious developers have that view. Some fleeting beginning developers do, but most of them end up giving up and quitting simply because they feel like using any outside tool or framework "isn't really developing". The general, academic, and widely-held view in software development is you never reinvent the wheel, and you use everything that is available to you unless you absolutely have to create something from scratch. I have had a taste of doing it completely from scratch in assembly (because all high-level languages are tools as well, only mildly different from a framework), and it ain't pretty

As far as bringing in more people, what has always seemed to push the community before was the release of tutorials, resources and tools based on popular topics and/or technologies. The things that I have seen bring in the most people are: Halls' Browser Based MMORPG tutorial series (easily discoverable by the popular search on YouTube and Google "create/program/make MMORPG" or "browser-based MMORPG"), and Halls' node.js tutorials and work (node is very hot right now with many beginning devs wanting to use it to make online games without knowing where to start). The marriage of node and ImpactJS in Halls' tutorials also got a lot of attention because there were two major communities with interest in it (node and Impact). It was written about and linked in several articles and websites we found when it came out. We got quite a few community members who stuck around just from that.

Of course I am not saying that Halls needs to get back to work on tutorials or anything lol. The whole community can contribute tutorials or tutorial series on anything they understand well and think they can teach.

A community project would be cool, but this would be about the tenth time it has been tried, and it never gets far for some reason. Well, there are a number of very concrete reasons it doesn't work, but that is aside from the point. If it can be pulled off, it would be awesome, though.

[overras]

L.E: Also, I propose to work on our own framework/platform/scripts etc. Just avoid using external things like frameworks (Zend, CodeIgniter etc) because , 50% of our work will be contested with texts like this "You guys are just lucky, without this X and Y this is a failure.." . My opinion not my condition .

Very few serious developers have that view. Some fleeting beginning developers do, but most of them end up giving up and quitting simply because they feel like using any outside tool or framework "isn't really developing". The general, academic, and widely-held view in software development is you never reinvent the wheel, and you use everything that is available to you unless you absolutely have to create something from scratch. I have had a taste of doing it completely from scratch in assembly (because all high-level languages are tools as well, only mildly different from a framework), and it ain't pretty

I heard this thing before. "Don't reinvent the wheel" .

But if you don't reinvent the wheel, you have no ideea what is a whell actually. You know just is round and can be moved just with a push. But I will never know how to make my own whell, with my own properties if I don't create one. So, in my opinion this thing started from arrogance of the big companies based on web developement or why not, from Zend' Team, Codeigntier , Cake-PHP etc . Guys, my advice, reinvent that well for 100x times , is the only way to learn "the big part" of a programming/scripting language. I can buy a cake from supermarket right? But I can do it at my home, with some ingredients, maybe wll be more sweet or big.

[Jackolantern]

But the exact point is that you don't have to know how it works. That is even one of the pillars of OOP, Encapsulation. Computer science also uses the term "Black Box" to refer to a piece of software that you only have to deal with in terms of input and output, without a care of how it works. If you had to stop, examine, rebuild and fully understand everything you use in programming (from the command that opens a socket in a high-level language to every framework and tool), you would never complete anything. Of course I do understand making your own MVC pattern code to see better how the internals work with routing and such, but then it is best to move on to a publicly-available framework if that is the pattern you want to work in. It just isn't possible that a single developer's efforts could ever match or surpass the contributions, testing and vetting thousands of open source developers working on one project can do. You can't ever, even in a 50 year career, understand every single domain of software engineering. So the best thing you can do is focus on what you want to work on. Only spend large amounts of time working on an MVC framework if you want to make MVC frameworks, not if you want to make web sites. Only create game engines if you want to make game engines, not if you want to make games. The list goes on. The reason for all of these is that you will spend so much time on the respective former you will never get to the latter.

And I can tell you for sure that the idea of "not reinventing the wheel" was not created by a company such as Zend, Ellis Labs (makers of CI), etc. It started in the 50's as one of the first principles of software engineering, likely before any of these company presidents or framework authors were even born

[dbest]

Do not get bogged down with inventing/reinventing the wheel. I am sure that is not boosting the community at this point in time.
- Tutorials are a good way to increase the community.
- Building a game. I think, we can have 2 teams. One that builds a game for the web and one that builds a game for the mobile or desktop. The key thing here is to make noise about the game whilst developing it. So regular forum posts and videos would be needed.