Alan Z. talks about how participating in community helps when learning new skills.

Starting something new

These days, it seems that a lot of things interest me. Whether job related or hobbies, there's a constant stream of information to deal with. Keeping up with all the new information (particularly with technology), can be overwhelming. It's sometimes hard to know the best way to find out how to ingest and digest the information.

Fortunately, for nearly everything I'm interested in, there's some community of people out there that have similar interests and are willing to share their experiences. The Internet allows me to learn from these people, ask questions, and get opinions.

This is particularly useful when attempting to learn a new skill. Sometimes the need for a new skill is thrust upon us when a manager says "you need to become proficient in <insert your particular technology here> for this project that you've just been assigned to". Other times we have the luxury of choosing something we want to study.

As a case in point, having had no musical background, I recently decided that I want to play a musical instrument, with the goal of someday playing with one of my sons who recently began playing guitar. So, the quest began… to find just the right kind of instrument for me, and figure out the best way to learn to play. A perfect storm of events and people led me to a particular string instrument. For the moment, the type of instrument isn't important (but let's just say that the world didn't need another middle-aged beginning guitar player), as the journey is more interesting than the destination.

The first thing I did was search the web for any forums dealing with the instrument. What struck me was that I didn't wonder if there was an online community, I expected there to be at least one place to interact with those with similar interests, and I was not disappointed.

Because the instrument is a bit quirky, it's not surprising that the community is equally quirky and the people who inhabit the community are real characters. The thing that impresses me is how welcoming they are, and how willing people are to help those anxious to learn.

How long should one sit in the audience?

I lurked quietly for about a week, reading as much as I could to get the feel of the community.

I don't have a problem with being an audience member. Sometimes I'm just not ready to participate. For many things that fascinate me, I'll never participate! I'm perfectly happy to watch divers swimming with sharks on TV. I don't need to get wet, and it's fine for others to get the adrenaline rush.

However, when it comes to something that I want/need to become good at, then I feel compelled to participate. So I introduced myself on the community forum, explained where I am located, how I came to the community, and asked that the thread be a place to list resources that novices should check out. In short, I wanted to learn how to learn.

Not only did this spawn lots of forum comments, I received a flurry of private messages from people letting me know about local events that I might want to attend. None of this would have happened if I hadn't spoken up.

I have lots of questions about my upcoming education. Should I learn to read standard music notation, chord charts, tablature, or just play by ear? Should I be self taught, or hire a teacher?

Fortunately, the amount of content on the internet is exploding… and a lot of it is being created by people who never created content before. Look at the proliferation of blog commentaries, and who would have imagined and all the videos showing up on the net? There are even EMC specific videos on YouTube, that range from technical whiteboard presentations to comical vignettes featuring the misguided IT antics of “Bob and Joe”.

However, whenever I've searched the net for available information, there's still things I'd like to see… things I wished were available, but don't seem to be there yet.

If you don't ask, you don't get

So what does all this have to do with the EDN?

From what I've seen, the EDN community members are very willing to share. For example, I've attended conference sessions where our members present material ranging from overviews to highly technical information. After the session concludes, the speakers are invariably swarmed by audience members who ask questions about things not covered, or wanting a deeper dive into the material. Often, the requests are an attempt to solve particular problems, but sometimes it's just that the audience member wants to know something that the speaker didn't think about presenting.

At a conference, there's usually an opportunity to corner the speaker and give feedback directly (that's one of the advantages of face to face meetings). However, what happens when you don't think of your questions quickly enough? What if something comes to you in the middle of the night? How do you continue the conversation? How do you open up the conversation to other people?

Fortunately, if you're interested in something that a speaker had to say... or interested in anything related to developing with EMC products and technologies, you can continue or initiate a thread on the EDN forums. The key point to consider is that if you don't ask for something, you'll rarely get exactly what you want. The forums are a place where your voice can and should be heard. I'm happy to say that in addition to their willingness to share, many of the EDN members seem to be quirky characters as well... and that's why I like them. Let's see how you can you influence the type of information available on the EDN.

Call for participation

Part of my job as EDN Editor is to gather content of interest to the EDN community members.

There's lots of documentation for EMC products. However, often it's painful to wade through thousands of pages of documentation to only find the "official" text on any given topic. Also, the official text doesn't have the benefit of the experiences and voices of the diverse developer communities that leverage the products and technologies.

It's time to take a different, community based approach to getting the right content to you. Rather than guess at what's interesting to you, I'm asking for your input. It's time for you to speak up!

To kick this off, I recently started a thread on the EDN forum, asking EDN members to make a list of topics that you want to see covered. As a pilot, the first thread was started in the Content Management forum area, where there are the most members participating. However we'll expand this to any and all of the EDN developer communities.

The topics can be best practices, technique overviews, "don't fall into this trap", design patterns, code samples, interviews with key developers or product managers, topics that you think are important for others to know about, etc. etc. etc.

Topics can be as general or as hairy-knuckle-detailed as you want/need them to be. They can be in document form, audio/video interviews, live/recorded online presentations, or some other format I haven't considered.

For each topic proposed, here's what we need:

• A descriptive title (required)
• Short abstract about the potential content (required)
• Describe the nature of any code samples you'd want to see (optional)
• Any rough table of contents (TOC) or outline (optional)

This should be an ongoing process, not a one time document list. Here's where I see this going:

• Individual members come up with ideas for content, and other members help refine the abstract, TOC, and other items to help flesh out the concept. One could even "vote" for ideas, so we get a feel of how to prioritize the topics.
• Next comes the trickier part... finding people to generate the content. These can come from within EMC, or (preferably) from the member community. In the near future, we're going to change the EDN infrastructure to make collaborative authoring very matter of fact. Think Wikis!
• The goal is to have living documents that can be easily updated with the latest information and opinions. Think community involvement... think about contributing as little or as much as you like.
• Those who propose and contribute to topics will receive a token of appreciation from the EDN (more details on this to come).

So, let's show that our members are up to the challenge and lead the way in the evolving EDN community. Our members can help generate and ride the new wave of targeted content.

New EDN Open Source Developer Center

More and more, people from around the world are collaborating on software projects. The new Open Source Developer Center contains Open Source projects released by members of the EDN community or by EMC.

The projects include:

• Three of the Documentum 6 Web Services Challenge winning projects
• EMC Centera .NET SDK
• Several Documentum utilities

Be sure to check out the projects and participate in their development.

New EDN Document Capture Developer Center

We're also pleased to announce the new Capture Developer Center for those who use ISIS to capture data from paper and electronic documents.

The new center includes:

• PixTools for .NET Code Samples
• Framework Design Guidelines
• PixTools for .NET Overview
• ISIS PixTools SDKs
• Enabling Scanner Multi-Stream article
• A new area on the EDN forums for discussions about document capture

If document capture is your area of expertise or interest... now's the time to get in on the ground floor of this EDN community.

What else is new?

The long awaited Documentum Composer has been released. There's now a flash demo presentation of the tool available on the EDN that walks through various areas of this great new Eclipse-based developer tool.

We're ramping up for EDN participation at EMC World 2008 in Las Vegas. There will be a developer track containing technical sessions across a wide range of EMC technologies and products. EDN will have a booth in the exhibition area, and we're planning several events that will help EDN community members connect with each other... and have a great deal of fun. The EDN community page on the EMCWorld web site has an overview of our events and will have details as soon as they become available.

Featured contributors

This month, let's highlight four members who are sharing their knowledge and expertise:

• Kunal Gaba submitted a WDK iTrace Tool for Documentum. Launched with a keyboard shortcut, the tool displays complete WDK component tracing information in real time after the form is rendered.
• Manish Pandit wrote an article about Using Jython to Connect to Documentum Docbases Via DFC. Interest in this article has already spawned a discussion thread on the EDN forums.
• Harjit Singh explores new ways of developing with Documentum using new Java syntax: Persisting Objects to Documentum Using Annotations.
• Bill Kuhhirte is an engineer in the EMC SMARTS group and a moderator to the Resource Management section of the EDN forums. He's contributed two articles: An Introduction to the Data eXchange Adapter, and Aggregate Notifications in SAM and the SMART Adapter Platform

Participate!

These contributions show the wide range of interests of the EDN community members.

Let's talk about what you need and want from the EDN. You can help shape the EDN, but only if you get involved. Our forums are the perfect place to speak up... or you can reach me at edn_editor@emc.com

Oh, and for any of you still curious, the instrument I'm attempting to learn is the mandolin. See, I told you that I like quirky things and people.

Alan Z.

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