Hey I’ve been using the Particle Photon for some time now and I’m wondering if there’s a slack/discord channels that devs hang out at. I see there’s a Particle Collider slack but it seems gated (you gotta email an employee and submit a git commit etc). I’ve had good experiences with slack/discord channels for technically challenging areas (ie 3D printing, other programming languages), and I’m wondering if there is community engagement outside the forums?
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Hey Lackdaz,
I’m not sure if there is another place outside the forums besides the Particle Collider (not even sure if that one is still used).
However, I have worked with products that use Slack, Gitter, Discourse and others for their community, and I think you can get a similar experience to Slack or Gitter, here with Discourse: just create a topic with your question, and let the community get you some answers.
I know, it might be a personal preference for you. In that case, please ignore what I just wrote.
Cheers,
Gustavo.
PS: and welcome to the Particle Community!
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from my experience slack and discord are best for collaboration and/or focus on somewhat specific project/product/device. i think there would be just too much going on within a “particle” channel if it became widely used. maybe a channel for development of the boron [or any one other product] might work. that would give someone who was perhaps only working with a particular device a more focused area of discussion. it would be very hard to match the expertise found on this forum regardless of the channel topic.
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Hmm… I mean, if you look at it. The strength of an informal information clearinghouse like discord/slack is that 1) you get an immediacy to your problem-solving (esp. when prototyping), 2) its generally a great one-stop place for all your interests (notwithstanding just particle) and 3) Its a great place to actually learn more about something from just eyeballing discussions. I think my general impression of product forums is one where you submit debug reports or post questions relating to particle devs, as opposed to the wider community.
I think there’s been a steady shift towards these informal channels (e.g. reddit, discord, slack) esp when driven by dev dominated communities (3D printing, programming languages) perhaps because this is something acceptable at work 
But hey, if this is where the wider community is at - I’ll be here. It’s just that and I was wondering if there were informal channels, that’s all.
that's right, the community is here!
You would not get here the sense of immediacy that one would get in slack or gitter (I sometimes get answers on any of them in a day or so, versus here in couple of hours or less) but I understand that preferences exist for either.
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Thanks for bringing this up, @lackdaz. I’m definitely curious about an arm of the community in Discord - is there any company out there who you feel has an effective presence on the platform?
I know that Adafruit has a large community on Discord.
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True, true. We’re actually in talks to do a takeover of that sometime this summer.
What about Slack groups, @nrobinson2000 - are there any out there that impress you?
Thanks for bringing this up, @lackdaz. I’m definitely curious about an arm of the community in Discord - is there any company out there who you feel has an effective presence on the platform?
I can’t really raise that many embedded product examples but …
For discord: I think the one that deserves special mention is Rise of Industry’s discord. Its a game company run by a former Blizzard dev that just went 1.0 for an early access game.
For slack: Definitely elixir-lang. It was a new programming language moving at a blistering pace and it doing a major release every month or two. The community is small 100-200 but all the authoritative figures were all in there so you could get bugs sorted out pretty fast.
It would definitely help to have the developers in there. In Particle's case however, the devs would most likely not join that channel, to keep noise to a minimum and stay focused. In general, those with the most answers are right here on the forums. An added benefit is that it serves as an archive that can be searched through. Working with Slack I've noticed many raised topics quickly vanishing under a flood of other chatter.
As for bugs, Github is probably the best place to raise them, since the Devs use that to work on.
More pressing issues like:"the cloud seems to be down" usually get picked up really quickly when posted here on the forums. The 'elites' have direct contact with Particle, and we definitely raise some flags when things seem off, coming from the community.
While I'm not opposed to additional platform, I worry it might spread the knowledge, and community, rather than keeping it centralized and easy to find. The forums have worked really well for Particle over the years, so I'm not quite seeing the value-add from 'splitting' that up yet.
We've have a Slack channel for the community (invite based, around 100+ of the active community members), which barely got used, with the last post being over a year old. Not sure if it would be much different if opened up to a free-for-all.
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@Moors7 I agree. The ability to search an archive of previously asked questions (and FAQs) has made this forum invaluable to me. While the idea of a Slack-type chat room is appealing for instant answers, I think the greater knowledge that is stored here would be lost.
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