Spread the word

Revision as of 14:32, 8 August 2007 by Bertrand Meyer (Talk | contribs) (Participate!)

Do you love Eiffel? Think Design by Contract is the best way to get programs right? Feel unable to live without multiple inheritance, genericity, once routines, agents, conversions, anchored types and other beautiful Eiffel mechanisms? Use EiffelStudio for seamless development of powerful systems, from analysis to design, implementation and maintenance? Revel in the productivity gains?

If you think the rest of the world should be using Eiffel too, there are many ways to help spread the technology. A few are listed here; of course you are welcome to add others to this list.

Communicate your excitement

  • Blog about what you do with EiffelStudio. If you don't have a blog yet, you may create one on eiffelroom.org.
  • Post on non-Eiffel mailing lists, especially when you see people encountering an issue nicely solved by Eiffel.
  • Write to the press about how you solved programming challenges with EiffelStudio.
  • Contact Eiffel Software to add your success story or testimonial.
  • Give Eiffel talks at your company.
  • Present your Eiffel-based work at technical conferences.

Help develop the community

  • When new users post questions to the EiffelStudio Developer mailing list or other forums, answer with constructive suggestions.
  • When users post requests for help, e.g. with a program that doesn't work, provide technical help.

Help make the Eiffel story well represented in the forums that matter to developers

Participate!

  • Add Eiffel support to an existing tool.
  • Add a class to EiffelBase and other libraries.
  • Contribute a new library.
  • Contribute or improve EiffelStudio or library documentation.
  • Provide or improve an internationalized version of EiffelStudio for a language you know (see the translator page to find out who is already working on international versions, and for the link to internationalization instructions).
  • Add a facility to EiffelStudio. Yes, it's 2 million lines of code, but its Eiffel code and not as formidable as it sounds!
  • Provide your feedback on new versions (EiffelStudio has two releases a year, Northern Spring and Southern Spring and things are moving quickly).
  • Participate in the open-source testing process of EiffelStudio, using advanced software engineering techniques.
  • To help prioritize requests for evolution, provide feedback on the EiffelStudio roadmap and the language roadmap (which contains the plan for implementation of the advances of the ISO/ECMA standard).
  • Help improve the Eiffel developer's site (this site). There's always useful information to add and better ways to organize the existing information.

The give an extensive list of current projects, ways to add new ones, and details on how to proceed if you want to make your mark on the Eiffel environment.

About style

When you post on forums and lists, your comments will reflect on Eiffel. Make sure to emphasize the benefits that brought you to Eiffel and explain them to newcomers. And always:

  1. Be nice.
  2. Respect other people and their opinions.
  3. Never flame anyone.