Tag Archives: irc

Join me on IRC

This site has a fair few readers. Nothing phenomenal: Google analytics tells me I get somewhere around 100 hits per day of whom about half are repeat visitors. It spikes when someone (often me) posts an article I wrote on reddit and hordes of irate people come here to tell me I’m an idiot (or, every now and then, to agree with me).

But it’s very much a one way channel. I’m talking at you rather than with you. That’s fine, but it only goes so far. A dialogue would be nice too. I don’t really know much about my readers, and I’d like to.

As an experiment to further this, I’ve created an IRC channel for the site. If it takes off, I’ll create a page for logs, etc. here and some more stuff for site/channel integration. But in the meantime, why not join me in #drmaciver on Freenode if you want to have a chat.

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Interest bandwidth

Highlight from the #scala IRC channel:

13:21 < DRMacIver> I have a somewhat unfortunate theory. I suspect the amount one cares about programming issues is inversely proportional to how inherently interesting one's work is.
13:22 < DRMacIver> Or at least negatively correlated
13:22 < ijuma> DRMacIver: is this based on personal experience? ;)
13:22 < DRMacIver> Yes
13:22  * DRMacIver finds it much harder to get worked up about language issues these days
13:23 < DRMacIver> Which is in large part because I'm doing a lot more interesting borderline computer sciencey work
13:24 < dgreensp> yeah, I do a lot of interesting work and only rarely stop to think about languages
13:24 < ijuma> yeah, I noticed. I think it makes sense. People have limited bandwidth and if work is interesting, it's likely to take quite a bit of it
13:25 < DRMacIver> I think the other issue is that people want to find what they do interesting. And so if *what* they do isn't interesting they have to become interested in *how* they do it.
13:25 < DRMacIver> But yes, the bandwidth thing is also a big part of it
13:26 < dgreensp> bandwidth minimum, bandwidth maximum :)
13:26 < DRMacIver> ?
13:27 < ijuma> DRMacIver: agreed
13:27 < dgreensp> er, the two points seemed related -- people need to be interested in something, but they can't be interested in too many things at once
13:28 < DRMacIver> Oh, right.
13:28 < DRMacIver> Yes. That's a good way of looking at it.
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