What's Hot? What's Not? Technical Searches

For Clojure, I generally Google first and, if I'm still stuck, then I ask on IRC since there always about 300 developers on the #clojure channel on freenode. Nearly all the open source projects out there use IRC as one of the primary support channels (if not the primary channel) and most of the big projects have about 300 developers online, nearly all the time. I usually have two IRC channels open in Emacs: one for #clojure itself and one for #leiningen, the primary build / dependency tool used by Clojure developers.

I'd love to be able to do that with CFML problems but hardly any CFML developers use IRC (and the handful that do use it more for wasting time than for work).

In the absence of a decent, open source style community for CFML, I'm stuck with Google, which usually leads to a handful of blogs or the proprietary documentation...

To the Web! If I have a CFML question, such as syntax or tag attributes/function arguments, I'll head to CFQuickdocs.com. Jake Munson has done a fantastic job putting that site together. It's lightweight and quick, and I can find the answer to my question very quickly.

If it's a more general question, I'll hit Google, which generally results in my ending up at Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow, and the entire Stack Exchange network of sites, has (seemingly out of nowhere) become one of the best places to get questions answered. It covers such a wide range of technologies, and the questions run the gamut from basic to brain-meltingly difficult. Of course answers are voted up or down, so you have a very good idea as to whether the answer you're looking at is viable.

If I can't find the question on the Web, and there's an appropriate mailing list, I'll post to the mailing list. But with the plethora of web-based resources available today, it's rare that I need to look elsewhere.

If I can't think of someone on my network that will probably know the answer, I hit the search on the interwebs. I use lesser known duckduckgo.com as my default search engine. While not as popular as Google, its results are every bit as pertinent. The results, not being guided by my past search history, often take me to real sites like blogs and not just to help aggression sites like Stack Overflow. So my advice: The internet is your friend, but don't let Google shape your view of the internet.

The obvious answer is Google, but on Google, I'll certainly consider some results more likely suspects than others. Stack Overflow has become an incredibly useful resource for technical questions. Any result there will typically be my first click when perusing Google results.

Barring Google, it then depends on the nature of my question. For ColdFusion, there is a private "Guru only" list that I'll typically hit first. And as an employee now, I've got access to the ColdFusion engineers as well, but I try not to abuse that.

I keep extensive notes on new things that I learn, on the results of experiments, and on just about everything I do. Many technical questions are just variations of things I've already seen and/or done, so there?s a good chance I?ll have a note on it. Sometimes the notes are not exactly what I need and a little experimentation may be necessary.

If I haven't seen the problem yet and I either can't or don't have time for experimentation, my next stop is usually Google. An inventive search term usually lands me a dozen useful answers. The main issue when doing research is deciding which to use and testing them to see what fits best.

If research fails, I fall back on the House of Fusion mailing lists. There are a lot of very knowledgeable people there and a question will usually be answered in less than an hour, many times with example code.

If all else fails, I go straight to people I know who would have the answer. I hate bothering people directly but there are times when you need an expert.