Should all developers be (active) members of the virtual community?

Usually when I blog, I make comments, raise decisions, write code or something like that, it’s never a question. This post, above anything else is a question and a try to spark a debate from my fellow developers and software craftsman out there.

Earlier this week I started working on a very interesting project for an international company creating test suites for devices and applications. The suite is cross platform and can run on any machine both windows and Linux and test any device, from mobile phones to DVD’s to diving sensors.

The client side is written in flex and pure AS3, the server and services are written in Java and Perl scripts.

What is my point?

My point is that this company has some pretty strong developers, all know a thing or 2 on software developement, both in Java and Flex.

Another thing, usually when I get invited to consult and develop for a company saying “we have a flex application” I do see an application but it’s horrible, un-scalable, mxml+code in the same file, services calls in mxml and more.

In this company, that wasn’t the case. The application is actually pretty solid, stable and gone over more then a couple of QA steps inside the company and clients. You can imagine that the developers over there can contribute a thing or two to the community.

OK, so far so good, what am I saying here?

From conversations I had with the developers I found out something amazing, none of them has a twitter account, none of them has a blog and none, absolutely none contributed to an open source project, not even a line of code, not even opened a case in the WIKI.

so, what do you think?

Should all developers be active members of the community?

Should every developer have a profile and answer questions on the amazing StackOverflow.com?

Should every developer write a blog?

Love to hear your thoughts on this…

Another thing, when you interview programmers, do you care about these issues?