Category: Ideas

DevRel Data: Presentation & Deductions

Before diving into conclusions, let’s take a look at some answers to questions asked. This is a slice of answers, with totals for the charts and such. After a few months of answers I’ll have another follow up to see how things may or may not change.

Do you like video material?

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What specifically do you, or would you like to watch in video? Screencasts, short videos, conversational, or some other type of videos?

  • Screencasts/tutorials
  • I love both screencasts going through big topics and short videos that cover smaller tips and gotchas.
  • Videos with a specific outcome as the goal, whether achieved or not. Showing the process of something.. like hey, here’s how you building out a Postgres cluster using streaming replication and repmgr and pgpool… Kind of thing.
  • Bite sized content, maybe 2 minutes, to teach me one thing.
  • Editing. No jokes, no “hey what’s up guys” with 60 second intros. Discuss the problem, then solve it.
  • Demos, learning a new way of doing something
  • Doesn’t matter short or long, but has to be deeply technical with code examples that I can actually apply
  • I watch videos mostly for fun.
  • Screencast
  • Short videos of say 5-10 minutes each covering different concept of the subject matter
  • (videos work best in a classroom setting where time/attention is precommitted, or as part of a tutorial)
  • conversational
  • Short videos.
  • If it’s too long, it ends up on my todo list forever (not good). So shorter is better. And something that benefits from visuals, rather than something that could just be written.
  • I also watch LinkedIn Learning when just starting a new tech. to get a general overview and pick up a tip or tow, then I read books and the Internet from there.
  • short videos

What kind of written material do you like?

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Do you like other material mixed in that details the reason for the tech, the story, or such?

chart3

Is there anything that comes to mind, that you’d like to have me or the team I’m working with (@ DataStax) put together that you’d find useful, entertaining, or related.

  • Place priorities on designing materials for more depth (i.e., more linked material) as well as less attention-nuisance. That’s no criticism of your work, merely the gestalt of where we work — so less noise is a better way to stand out and make materials useful.
  • Maybe focus more on written material – code & architecture material (books, articles) rather than videos and twitch. It is much easier to consume and is easily googlable. Also I’d suggest making blog posts target a specific common issue or question – sometimes I see posts that I don’t really care about or the problem is so narrow that I don’t want to read about it. I’d read about building resilient and highly available architectures in various configurations.
  • Database reliability, scalability, migrations and such stuff is interesting.
  • Anything to do with machine learning.
  • Data model examples, starting up a Cassandra node, configuring YAML, etc

Deductions

I’m going to go backwards through the questions and discuss what I’ve deducted, and in some ways what has surprised me among the answers!

First there’s the “Is there anything that comes to mind, that you’d like to have me or the team I’m working with (@ DataStax) put together that you’d find useful, entertaining, or related.” request and questions.

The answers here didn’t surprise me much at all. Within DevRel from Microsoft to DataStax to Google to many other organizations we have this ongoing battle between “write a whole book on it” or “make it 2 minutes short”. It’s wildly difficult to determine what format, what timing, and what structure material needs to be in for it to be most useful to people. So when I saw the answer that reads, “Place priorities on designing materials for more depth (i.e., more linked material) as well as less attention-nuisance.” I immediately thought, “yeah, for real, but ugh…” it’s difficult. However, I’m working on more thorough material, some of it will be paywalled via LinkedIn Learning or Pluralsight and other material may be available by book in the coming months. But there will be other material that will indeed be long form how to material on how to really put things together – from scratch and from the basis of “we have X thing and need to hack it so we can add a feature”.

The next answer I got in this section that I completely agree with is increasing the focus on written material. I’m making tons of video, and I’ve got that down to the point where it’s actually easier and faster to do most of it then it is to write things down. However I realized, especially from my own point of view, that written material actually ends up being vastly more useful than video material. That’s also why, even with the video material, when I’m covering specifics I aim to provide a linkable timeline and a blog entry with the code and other changes shown in the video. Thanks for reinforcing these efforts and giving me that indirect encouragement to make this process and the results even better. More written material is on its way!

As for the database reliability, scalability, migrations, machine learning, data modeling, Cassandra node starting, and all that it’s in the queue and I’m getting to it as fast as I possibly can.

Next question I asked is, “Do you like other material mixed in that details the reason for the tech, the story, or such?”

It appears, albeit not a huge contingent of people, some people are curious about biking, train coding, and making good grub! Hey, that’s groovy cuz I’ve got a show coming out which is basically the behind the scenes videos about all those topics that make the coding and technology hacking possible!

The one outlier in this set however is clearly the request for “Ways to simplify life to dig through those algorithms faster, easier, better?” which I didn’t suspect would be any different then the other answers for this questions. Which left me surprised and ill-prepared on what to do about fulfilling what is clearly a demand. I’ll have to up level my blog posts around algorithms. I did do a couple a long while ago now in “Algorithms 101: Big Sums” which I completed in Go and another I wrote up “Algorithms 101: Roads & Town Centers” which I have 90% of the answer complete but I’ve never finished the blog entry! I guess it’s time to get the algorithm train coupled up and ready to depart!

Then the question, “What kind of written material do you like?”

Two options lead by a healthy margin for this question: Demos w/ Write Up and Blog Articles. With this coupled up to the first question it’s clear that written material via blog and demoes via blog should and ought to be top priority. They are, however they’re a whole helluva lot of work, so I only get them produced but so fast. Got some gems coming on Go, Bash, Cassandra, and a few other demo, tech, and historical information.

Next up was single page cheat sheets and documentation, followed closely by books. I kind of expected documentation and books, but wow that single page cheat sheets option is higher rated than I would have suspected and by proxy I’ve immediately added that to my produce this type of material list! I put it in as a very secondary thought but it’s going to get into that increased focus queue.

The last one with some semblance of demand is pamphlet size short form. This one almost seems like a fluke, but I’ll ponder putting together some of these. I know O’Reilly has their short novelette size books which cover a particular topic. They hand these out for free at conferences and seem pretty solid. Maybe I’ll work one of those into the queue? Maybe.

The other three options scraped by with 1%, so somebody was choosing them. So the vi mug isn’t a priority nor the short explainer videos. Which seems in contention with video content demands around shorter content. I guess, explainer videos just doesn’t sound useful!

The next question I just put together a top three of the results, “What specifically do you, or would you like to watch in video? Screencasts, short videos, conversational, or some other type of videos?”

  1. Make screen casts.
  2. Make screen casts generally short.
  3. Make screen cases that are short and on a specific and deep dive into a topic.

This seems kind of in conflict with itself, but I’m going to aim for it and try to hone the skill further. So that I can produce screen casts, screen casts that are generally short, and make sure that these screen casts that are short are on a specific and deep dive into a topic. Whew, got it.

Finally, “do you like video material?”

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At this time, 53.8% of you have said yes. I had guessed it would be around 50%.

I had guessed no would be about 25%, and at 23.1% I wasn’t to far off.

The other respective mishmash of answers made for interesting depth to the questions that followed this question.

Article Summary & TLDR

Produce more topic specific, detailed material around screen casts and blog entries!

End of story.

For more on this information, why I asked, and what I do check out my article titled “Evangelism, Advocacy, and Activism in The Technology Industry” and for some of the big victories for big corporations check out “The Developer Advocates – Observations on Microsoft’s New Competence“.

How Long do You Code Per Coding Session?

I was working on getting the latest DataStax Enterprise 6 up and running via the Docker Image offerings today and I stumbled across a site called hashnode.com. On that site was a harmless little question but something I realized I ponder a lot, and even find myself in conversation about on a regular basis. The question (link) is posed,

“How many minutes/hours do you really sit to write code at a particular moment?

I’m not saying the total summation of hours you code a day. When you really sit down to write a code for a particular task at a moment, how many minutes/hours (at worst case) do you normally sit down before you get tired? I know some take break, some say it depends on the task or the individual, I would love to hear them all, and what you do to keep your brain refreshed before getting back to coding. Thanks…”

This question, in normal coder fashion, has one simple answer the belies the actual complexity of the individual complex answers, “it depends“. So that’s the first answer, but here are some of the other answers for me. As with many of these types of questions and answers, many individual characteristics come into play for each of us, so this is indeed anecdotal scenarios for myself and very specifically YMMV for yourself! Continue reading “How Long do You Code Per Coding Session?” →

Let’s Really Discuss Lock In

For to long lock-in has been referred to with an almost entirely negative connotation even though it can be inferred in positive and negative situations. The fact is that there’s a much more nuanced and balanced range to benefits and disadvantages of lock-in. Often this may even be referred to as this or that dependency, but either way a dependency often is just another form of lock in. Weighing those and finding the right balance for your projects can actually lead to lock-in being a positive game changer or something that simply provides one a basis in which to work and operate. Sometimes lock-in actually will provide a way to remove lock-in by providing more choices to other things, that in turn may provide another variance of lock-in.

Concrete Lock-in Examples

The JavaScript Lock-In

IT Security icons. Simplus seriesTake the language we choose to build an application in. JavaScript is a great example. It has become the singular language of the web, at least on the client side. This was long ago, a form of lock-in that browser makers (and standards bodies) chose that dictated how and in which direction the web – at least web pages – would progress.

JavaScript has now become a prominent language on the server side now too thanks to Node.js. It has even moved in as a first class language in serverless technology like AWS’s Lambda. JavaScript is a perfect example of a language, initially being a source of specific lock-in, but required for the client, that eventually expanded to allow programming in a number of other environments – reducing JavaScript’s lock in – but displacing lock in through abstractions to other spaces such as the server side and and serverless functions.

The .NET Windows SQL Server Lock In

IT Security icons. Simplus seriesJavaScript is merely one example, and a relatively positive one that expands one’s options in more ways than limits one’s efforts. But let’s say the decision is made to build a high speed trading platform and choose SQL Server, .NET C#, and Windows Server. Immediately this is a technology combination that has notoriously illuminated in the past * how lock-in can be extremely dangerous.

This application, say it was built out with this set of technology platforms and used stored procedures in SQL Server, locking the application into the specific database, used proprietary Windows specific libraries in .NET with the C# code, and on Windows used IIS specific advances to make the application faster. When it was first built it seemed plenty fast and scaled just right according to the demand at the time.

Fast forward to today. The application now has a sharded database when it hit a mere 8 Terabytes, loaded on two super pumped up – at least for today – servers that have many cores, many CPUs, GPUs, and all that jazz. They came in around $240k each! The application is tightly coupled to a middle tier, that is then sort of tightly coupled to those famous stored procedures, and the application of course has a turbo capability per those IIS Servers.

But today it’s slow. Looking at benchmarks and query times the database is having a hard time dealing with things as is, and the application has outages on a routine basis for a whole variation of reasons. Sometimes tracing and debugging solves the problems quickly, other times the servers just oversubscribe resources and sit thrashing.

Where does this application go? How does one resolve the database loading issues? They’ve already sunk a half million on servers, they’re pegged out already, horizontally scaling isn’t an option, they’re tightly coupled to Window Servers running IIS removing the possibility of effectively scaling out the application servers via container technologies, and other issues. Without recourse, this is the type of lock in that will kill the company if something is changed in a massive way very soon.

To add, this is the description of an actual company that is now defunct. I phrased it as existing today only to make the point. The hard reality is the company went under, almost entirely because of the costs of maintaining and unsustainable architecture that caused an exorbitant lock in to very specific tools – largely because the company drank the cool aid to use the tools as suggested. They developed the product into a corner. That mistake was so expensive that it decimated the finances of the company. Not a good scenario, not a happy outcome, and something to be avoided in every way! This is truly the epitomy of negative lock in.

Of course there’s this distinctive lock in we have to steer clear from, but there’s the lock in associated with languages and other technology capabilities that will help your company move forward faster, easier, and with increasing capabilities. Those are the choices, the ties to technology and capabilities that decision makers can really leverage with fewer negative consequences.

The “Lock In” That Enables

IT Security icons. Simplus seriesOne common statement is, “the right tool for the job”. This is of course for the ideal world where ideal decisions can be made all the time. This doesn’t exist and we have to strive for balance between decisions that will wreck the ship or decisions that will give us clear waters ahead.

For databases we need to choose the right databases for where we want to go versus where we are today. Not to gold plate the solution, but to have intent and a clear focus on what we want our future technology to hold for us. If we intend to expand our data and want to maintain the ability to effectively query – let’s take the massive SQL Server for example – what could we have done to prevent it from becoming a debilitating decision?

A solution that could have effectively come into play would have been not to shard the relational database, but instead to either export or split the data in a more horizontal way and put it into a distributed database store. Start building the application so that this system could be used instead of being limited by the relational database. As the queries are built out and the tight coupling to SQL Server removed, the new distributed database could easily add nodes to compensate for the ever growing size of the data stored. The options are numerous, that all are a form of lock-in, but not the kind that eventually killed this company that had limited and detrimentally locked itself into use of a relational database.

At the application tier, another solution could have been made to remove the ties to IIS and start figuring out a way to containerize the application. One way years ago would have been to move away from .NET, but let’s say that wasn’t really an option for other reasons. The idea to mimic containerization could have been done through shifting to a self-contained web server on Windows that would allow the .NET application to run under a singular service and then have those services spin off the application as needed. This would decouple from IIS, and enable spreading the load more quickly across a set number of machines and eventually when .NET Core was released offer the ability to actually containerize and shift entirely off of Windows Server to a more cost efficient solution under Linux.

These are just some ideas. The solutions of course would vary and obviously provide different results. Above all there are pathways away from negative lock in and a direction toward positive lock in that enables. Realize there’s the balance, and find those that leverage lock in positively.

Nuanced Pedantic Notes:

  • Note I didn’t say all examples, but just that this combo has left more than a few companies out on a limb over the years. There are of course other technologies that have put companies (people actually) in awkward situations too. I’m just using this combo here as an example. For instance, probably some of the most notorious lock in comes from the legal ramifications of using Oracle products and being tied into their sales agreements. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Stack Overflow is a great example of how choosing .NET and scaling with it, SQL Server, and related technologies can work just fine.

Crazy Conf Notions. Viable?

While at Goto Conf in Chicago today I had two thoughts while talking with Joe (@joelaha) while hanging out with Bridget (@bridgetkromhout) while waiting for Lena’s (@lenadroid) talk on “Distributed Data Stores on Kubernetes“. All that wrapped up into a few ideas for future conferences. Here, I present them to you dear readers, please lament, lamblast, lacerate, or decimate this list of groovy ideas I have. Comments welcome, or scream at me a tweet or two on Twitter @Adron!
Continue reading “Crazy Conf Notions. Viable?” →

In-memory Orchestrate Local Development Database

I was talking with Tory Adams @BEZEI2K about working with Orchestrate‘s Services. We’re totally sold on what they offer and are looking forward to a lot of the technology that is in the works. The day to day building against Orchestrate is super easy, and setting up collections for dev or test or whatever are so easy nothing has stood in our way. Except one thing…

Every once in a while we have to work disconnected. For whatever the reason might be; Comcast cable goes out, we decide to jump on a train or one of us ends up on one of those Q400 puddle jumpers that doesn’t have wifi! But regardless of being disconnected from wifi, cable or internet connectivity we still want to be able to code and test!

In Memory Orchestrate Wrapper

Enter the idea of creating an in memory Orchestrate database wrapper. Using something like convict.js one could easily redirect all the connections as necessary when developing locally. That way development continues right along and when the application is pushed live, it’s redirected to the appropriate Orchestrate connections and keys!

This in memory “fake” or “mock” would need to have the key value, events, and graph store setup just like Orchestrate. With the possibility of having this in memory one could also easily write tests against a real fake and be able to test connected or disconnected without mocking. Not to say that’s a good or bad idea, but just one more tool in the tool chest doesn’t hurt!

If something like this doesn’t pop up in the next week or three, I might just have to kick off this project myself! If anybody is interested please reach out to me and let’s discuss! I’m open to writing it in JavaScript, C#, Java or whatever poison pill you’d prefer. (I’m not polyglot to limit my options!!)

Other Ideas, Development Shop Swap

Another idea that I’ve been pondering is setting up a development shop swap. I’ll leave the reader to determine what that means!  😉  Feel free to throw down ideas that this might bring up and I’ll incorporate that into the soon to be implementation. I’ll have more information about that idea right here once the project gets rolling. In the meantime, happy coding!