Mythology - Free Stuff

Last night I sent a lot of time helping James Britt solve some issues with the Monkeybars app JotBot. It took a long time, and we finally got it sorted out. James was really appreciative for my help. Being the greedy, entrepreneurial individual I am, I felt like I had spent a lot more time than I wanted to on the problem. After all, I was now further behind on other tasks I had set out to do. James wasn't wrong to ask for my help, nor was I in giving it to him.

Then it sprang to me. Wouldn't it be nice if nobody had to worry about this again? As payment for Jame's sins help, I had him do three hail Marys write some documentation on Monkeybar's wiki page that details our struggles.

This is a huge help to me, because I spend a lot of time helping our users for Monkeybars and Rawr, but I don't get a lot of time to go back and document what went on. If I ask them to help me out by leaving a note for others, it can make life a lot easier for everyone, and furthers along these open source projects.

It may seem pretty simple, but I urge anyone with an open source project to request documentation/specs in return for the help. You helped the user, let them help you a little. It's not a lot of work to document something, and it helps ensure you won't have to help on the same topic again (just hand them a link). Others will just see the docs and come to help with more unique and important problems. In the end, everyone wins, and nothing is free (: