This is a feature. Most of the people on an IRC channel are lurkers. And the channels are very quiet so that people can hear you when you do speak. Believe me, I wish they were quieter, because even as they are they tend to be too distracting for me to lurk there while working.
It does seem creepy. Our company's salespeople laugh at the programmers because we really love to gather in one physical room, then sit silently next to each other typing on laptops and communicating largely via Jabber chat and IRC, even though we are two feet away from each other. If you've never tried to concentrate on programming this seems like alien behavior, but it actually makes a lot of sense, for the same reason that it makes sense for all the Drupal devs to sit in one IRC channel but almost never speak.
If you crave more chat, join more channels in parallel.
I guess I don't actually find the 300-lurkers-who-never-talk channels much of a feature. Much prefer the ones with 15-30 or so semi-active users. There can still be large periods of not chatting, but you know who's there, and there's a decent chance that when someone does say something, it's relevant to you. There's a difference between sitting in a room of programmers quietly, and sitting in an auditorium of programmers!
Ive done this, it is amazingly productive. We had jabber server at one place, and all 10 devs were in the same room physically, as well as the chats: #dev #dev_pvt #dev_funny #dev_offtopic #bugs as well as having a dozen side conversations, and talking out loud in the room. Never too much time blocking on conversations, and easily ignorable when working on something deep, but since physical presence is happening, anything super important can trigger an "out loud" interrupt.
Generally, when somebody says "Hi", my reaction is "Oh dear, here comes the dumb question" and I cringe.
9/10 Times I'm right.
Generally I tend to /join and then just sit there for a while to discover the norms and protocols of the channel before speaking, unless I have a specific question/problem.
If I have a specific question/problem then "Just ask" is the best approach, but sadly, 9/10 times I end up fixing the problem myself, and get roped in to help solve 10 other peoples problems while I'm there!.
There's a rare occasion when you'll /join a channel and they'll greet you, but thats part of the 'norms and protocols of the channel' thing, and its usually a hallmark of a small channel, because having 500 users who come and go, if every one said 'hi' , or we greeted each and every one, $topic would never get discussed, and we'd be a 24/7 meet-and-greet channel!
Whatever OSS projects you use have channels on freenode. Keep those open all day and lurk, you'll be amazed how much you learn from osmosis. If someone comes by with an easy question, answer it and you'll have social karma to get help from others when you need it.
You mean you actually keep a chat window open all day long? Isn't that ridiculously distracting?
I check my email twice a day, and HN the same. Anything else that could potentially distract me from what I'm doing gets turned off. I couldn't imagine giving random strangers the ability to intrude into my train of thought whenever they wanted.
My irssi remains open all the time I'm in front of the computer - Shadowcat's primary internal co-ordination means is IRC, plus I'm on a dozen or so irc.perl.org channels, plus a handful on freenode.
It does not, however, alert me in any way as to whether somebody's tried to contact me or not - so it only gets my attention when I want it to, usually because I'm thinking about something and can type responses on autopilot while I do.
I keep the client running in the background (not even minimized). I have it set to save a log of all chats. I occasionally glance through those logs 2-3 times during the day. That's also the same frequency with which I check my mail.
I use an IRC bouncer to stay logged in to the IRC servers. I connect to the bouncer, which replays anything I missed on the IRC server while I'm not logged in to the bouncer.
I run znc on a small VPS instance that is always running, always up, so I don't have to worry about keeping my connection to an IRC server open. ZNC (the bouncer) keeps me logged in to the IRC server, and I connect to ZNC when I need to be in contact with others.
Where I work we use IRC as the main way to communicate (we all telecommute) and I have a window open all day long. The secret? Tell your IRC client to make a noise whenever someone mentions your IRC nick and then ignore the IRC window until it makes the noise. Works like a charm and allows me to focus on the task at hand.
I wanted to second this. I do the same thing. We use IRC at my company and we all work remotely. Having IRC in my editor makes things much simpler since I can easily copy/paste code, visit links and generally stay in one environment all day.
You apparently have ADD. You should seek help. There is a difference in preventing distraction and people "intruding" your thought process. I shut a lot of things off (preventing distraction) as well during the day (including Mail at times), however, IRC doesn't "intrude" in my daily work, it just sits there, open, and I check it when I can, participate in a conversation, and move on.
If you can't lurk and review in realtime, setup logging on your irc client and review later. I do automatically no matter what, happy that if a great conversation occurs, it's automatically captured. Screen, tmux, or similar may be helpfull in this case; setup your client in tmux on appropriate computer, detach, and review later.
I much prefer this to posting a question on a forum/stackoverflow etc type site. Probably my own impatience, but I want an answer now.
IRC is actually growing a load. It's pretty widely used. The fun thing is, I don't think anyone really realizes it, and it's still considered 'old stuff' by many.
If you look at the numbers, twitter usage is about the same as one of the tiny IRC networks in terms of volume of messages. Of course it's apples vs frogs comparison, but still... More communication is done on IRC than twitter and all the other "hot" new things.
#startups is good on freenode (If you can stand freenode and their 'ways')
I think you may be to blame for some of this growth ;) Not that I mind...I've used IRC for ages and I'm glad to see that people are gaining interest in it again.
I started using irc in january of 2008, about the time I started using linux.
I'm on foonetic and subluminal (a new network, about 6 or 7 months old).
foonetic is host to the various #xkcd-<whatever> channels, as well as the main #xkcd channel.
subluminal is just something some friends of mine put together. the average user count is in the twenties.
Absolutely this. Freenode is a tremendous resource. I adore the fact that for just about any project I can tab over to IRC, /join #projectname, and have a channel full of people who can answer the big blocking question that I can't find an answer for on Google.
I use bitlbee to gate all of my IM networks to a single IRC channel which I then point X-Chat at. I also ocassionaly jump onto freenode to get real time support for various open source packages.
Another user of Bitlbee here. It goes hand in hand with using irssi and a bouncer to maintain an always-on presence that I can take with me anywhere I go.
I hang out on a private IRC server with about 15 folks, mostly old friends of mine working in various parts of the industry. It's primarily a place to talk about geeky topics and complain about work.
Ditto. We also have a wiki and a tumblr site where we post immature nonsense. We all (except one of us) used to work at the same place, but now we're geographically and employmentologically spread out.
My group of peers does the same thing. It's a pretty broad cross section of nerds (as broad as that can be) -- the channel is busy 8-5 weekdays and dead outside those hours. Basically, they're my virtual (and one physical) officemates.
Same here. We've had a private channel running for over a decade now and as people move to new jobs and shuffle around, the channel is always home.
We've even built a bot to capture URLs and tweet them to a private handle so people can check out sites after work or while away from the channel.
To the person asking if IRC is distracting, it's a LOT less distracting than the hipster that sits next to me and is constantly checking his smartphone every time an SMS comes in. Pavlov would roll over in his grave.
Yep. Freenode IRC. I lurk on about 25 channels, ranging from the local Linux User's Group channel, to the #startups channel (which draws a lot of HN'ers) to the channels for several programming languages I use, etc.
IRC is definitely alive and well, especially on Freenode.
Just curious, why not have the windows key be your primary meta for XMonad? In general I try and use that key for my WM shortcuts since most apps don't use it.
Because it's slightly less convenient for my thumb to reach, and just feels unnatural: it causes an ever-so-slight strain as I try to keep my fingers on the keyboard's home row. Yes, I can be pretty finicky sometimes. I know I'd probably get used to it if I tried, but it's rare for me to need alt for applications.
IRC network actually - irc.perl.org is 6 servers, four of them on Shadowcat's hardware, the others donated by individual members of the perl community.
At my previous workplace, a web devshop, we had a company channel where everyone hanged, even the CEO (when he could). Plus project-channels where we could discuss details of each project, and where we invited clients and partners that used IRC.
At my previous company we had an IRC room for the devs (and whoever else wanted to join) which had a bot that reported on updates to certain feeds within the company, it was pretty useful and it's not distracting at all. I used irssi+screen, the bot was a Supybot.
IRC is an indispensable part of my work. The team I'm on uses a private server for team discussions (works great when someone is working remotely), and we also are in a few public channels on freenode. On freenode, I'm in #openstack to talk about cloud object storage infrastructure, #eventlet to learn more about it, and #cloudfiles for Rackspace product-specific questions. #openstack has been pretty active in the last couple of weeks (since we released the code) and has been pretty good for helping people who are learning about the systems. Internally, I can't imagine not using IRC. If I choose to work remotely, or if I'm working odd hours, it becomes a very important tool to keep up with what the other devs are doing.
To stay in the channel when I'm not online, I use an IRC bouncer (znc running on a slice, for me). When I log back in on my computer, I have the conversation I "missed" played back for me. I know other people that use irssi in a screen session to accomplish something similar.
Of course. Mostly for private communication with friends and with BitlBee gateway. But it seems that many OSS project have freenode channels, that are very active, and not only that. There's very active #haskell channel on freenode, #xmonad, there are various fedora channels, there's an unofficial channel for students of the faculty where I study now, even channels like #lgbtreddit.
I don't see any decline of IRC use in any foreseeable future.
We (developers and sysadmins) use it at the big corporation where I work. Keeping irssi open in screen (GNU screen) means I can connect remotely from anywhere with a single session, and it doesn't appear when I'm focused on something else in a different screen session. Each project gets its own channel. It's way better for collaboration than having to match schedules for each little question.
It's also very helpful for asking specific questions about OSS projects, as mentioned. The people actually developing projects hang out in IRC, not at StackOverflow.
I was pretty active in the suse project with bug testing and whatnot for a while, so that got me on freenode. I lurk about 15 channels there.
I'm on two private networks with about 5 channels between them and I lurk on Undernet out of nostalgia. I'll hit up Efnet if I'm looking for security related topics.
I telecommute, and most of my day-to-day conversations go over IRC. My IRC client has ~50 open windows at the moment, but less than half of them are actual Open Source channels, many of them are direct queries with the user. And thanks to screen, I never log off and don't miss discussions, someone trying to get in touch, commit and release messages to -dev channels, and so on.
If it suits one's style, it's an easy and nice way to stay linked to one or more communities.
137 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] thread*Maybe we're not all HN'ers, but darn close.
It does seem creepy. Our company's salespeople laugh at the programmers because we really love to gather in one physical room, then sit silently next to each other typing on laptops and communicating largely via Jabber chat and IRC, even though we are two feet away from each other. If you've never tried to concentrate on programming this seems like alien behavior, but it actually makes a lot of sense, for the same reason that it makes sense for all the Drupal devs to sit in one IRC channel but almost never speak.
If you crave more chat, join more channels in parallel.
This is especially good when there's only a few people talking, as fewer people => more interesting conversations (usually).
9/10 Times I'm right.
Generally I tend to /join and then just sit there for a while to discover the norms and protocols of the channel before speaking, unless I have a specific question/problem.
If I have a specific question/problem then "Just ask" is the best approach, but sadly, 9/10 times I end up fixing the problem myself, and get roped in to help solve 10 other peoples problems while I'm there!.
There's a rare occasion when you'll /join a channel and they'll greet you, but thats part of the 'norms and protocols of the channel' thing, and its usually a hallmark of a small channel, because having 500 users who come and go, if every one said 'hi' , or we greeted each and every one, $topic would never get discussed, and we'd be a 24/7 meet-and-greet channel!
I check my email twice a day, and HN the same. Anything else that could potentially distract me from what I'm doing gets turned off. I couldn't imagine giving random strangers the ability to intrude into my train of thought whenever they wanted.
It does not, however, alert me in any way as to whether somebody's tried to contact me or not - so it only gets my attention when I want it to, usually because I'm thinking about something and can type responses on autopilot while I do.
I wish there was a way to say, "show me everything from the current conversation alone". Maybe by tracking @replies or something.
I've also heard of Bip (http://bip.t1r.net/), but I've never used it.
I run znc on a small VPS instance that is always running, always up, so I don't have to worry about keeping my connection to an IRC server open. ZNC (the bouncer) keeps me logged in to the IRC server, and I connect to ZNC when I need to be in contact with others.
IRC is actually growing a load. It's pretty widely used. The fun thing is, I don't think anyone really realizes it, and it's still considered 'old stuff' by many.
If you look at the numbers, twitter usage is about the same as one of the tiny IRC networks in terms of volume of messages. Of course it's apples vs frogs comparison, but still... More communication is done on IRC than twitter and all the other "hot" new things.
#startups is good on freenode (If you can stand freenode and their 'ways')
#linode on oftc is great
#googleajaxapis is cool on geekshed
#mibbit is great on irc.mibbit.net :)
I'm on foonetic and subluminal (a new network, about 6 or 7 months old). foonetic is host to the various #xkcd-<whatever> channels, as well as the main #xkcd channel. subluminal is just something some friends of mine put together. the average user count is in the twenties.
We've even built a bot to capture URLs and tweet them to a private handle so people can check out sites after work or while away from the channel.
To the person asking if IRC is distracting, it's a LOT less distracting than the hipster that sits next to me and is constantly checking his smartphone every time an SMS comes in. Pavlov would roll over in his grave.
IRC is definitely alive and well, especially on Freenode.
Freenode. If you're into perl, they have an IRC server of their own.
I have been working remotely for the past year or so and we use it to keep the team in touch with one another.
To stay in the channel when I'm not online, I use an IRC bouncer (znc running on a slice, for me). When I log back in on my computer, I have the conversation I "missed" played back for me. I know other people that use irssi in a screen session to accomplish something similar.
I use XChat on Ubuntu, and it is perfect for my limited usage.
I don't see any decline of IRC use in any foreseeable future.
It's also very helpful for asking specific questions about OSS projects, as mentioned. The people actually developing projects hang out in IRC, not at StackOverflow.
I'm on two private networks with about 5 channels between them and I lurk on Undernet out of nostalgia. I'll hit up Efnet if I'm looking for security related topics.
#rubymn (Minnesota ftw)
#railsbridge (if you're interested in ruby on rails; the http://railsbridge.com community)
If it suits one's style, it's an easy and nice way to stay linked to one or more communities.