My name is Rion and I have a Problem.

Earlier this month, I began this blog and additionally started a mission to contribute to all of the great communities that have helped smooth the often bumpy roads for me to make my professional life a bit easier. Everything has been going much better than I could have imagined and I never thought that I would have been having so much fun doing so.

The Community

After a few days of bouncing around from different forums across the web, I finally settled in on the ASP.Net Forums to be my base of operations. I found it very easy to navigate and it was just popular enough to not feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of questions, discussions and breadth of topics covered (unlike the MSDN Forums and Stack Overflow can occasionally be).

The community at ASP.Net could not be better. The community ranges from those just getting started in the .NET world to perennial Microsoft MVPs and a bevy of Microsoft employees as well. The folks at Neudesic have done a great job working with Microsoft on the forums and are always willing to answer questions and discuss possibly improvements to the site itself. The forums are well moderated by very knowledgeable people that are actually experts in the areas that they moderate (unlike those you might occasionally find on other forums).

The only problem that I can even think of when it comes to the forum is that I cannot seem to get away from it.

A slightly embarrassing screen-capture of my addiction.

I’ve been doing my best to keep up my “resolution” to contribute as much as possible and try to provide quality assistance and explanations to those that need it. The whole experience so far has been more enjoyable and I have have learned far more than I thought would have been possible and I hope to keep the trend going for as long as I possibly can. I’ve set a few very ambitious goals for myself on the forums to see what I can accomplish within a year, but I am confident that even if I don’t reach those I will still have helped a great deal of people (and I don’t think I will really be able to just stop after a year).

I still try to hop on over to Stack Overflow whenever I can, however it’s on the back-burner for now (although I set some personal goals there as well for this year). Regardless, I’m sure that any contribution at all  is better than none and as long as I am helping out someone in someway, then I am good with that.

The Blog

I’ve enjoyed the whole blogging aspect more than I thought I would as well (when I can pull myself away from the forums) and I can see why all of those  prolific developer-bloggers out there are doing what they are doing. (Hint: It’s actually fun.) I probably have around 10 different drafts of posts already on this blog and I hop on occasionally to post little snippets of topics that I would like to cover to remind myself. It’s still taking a while to get used to, but I’m having fun (and hopefully some people out there are at least reading or skimming over it.)

Once I get some time, I’ll create a fresh site using Orchard (which I am actually crazy about) and transition the blog and its content over to it’s own site (not the biggest fan of the whole being-a-subdomain thing). Who knows, maybe the transition from WordPress to Orchard could be the inaugural post on the new site? -makes a quick note-

Alright. Enough of this. Back to the Forums.

The itching is starting to return, which is my body telling me that it needs its fix. But at least this “addiction” is a positive one, dedicating to actually giving back and assisting people as there are far less productive things that I could be doing with my time. (*cough* Reddit *cough*)