Over the last week I had the privilege and adventure of coming out to Chicago and Dallas to teach about operations and security capabilities of DataStax Enterprise. More about that later in this post, first I’ll elaborate on and answer the following:
What is DataStax Developer Day? Why would you want to attend?
Where are the current DataStax Developer Day events that have been held, and were future events are going to be held?
Possibilities for future events near a city you live in.
What is DataStax Developer Day?
The way we’ve organized this developer day event at DataStax, is focused around the DataStax Enterprise built on Apache Cassandra product, however I have to add the very important note that this isn’t merely just a product pitch type of thing, you can and will learn about distributed databases and systems in a general sense too. We talk about a number of the core principles behind distributed systems such as the pivotally important consistent hash ring, datacenter and racks, gossip, replication, snitches, and more. We feel it’s important that there’s enough theory that comes along with the configuration and features covered to understand who, what, where, why, and how behind the configuration and features too.
The starting point of the day’s course material is based on the idea that one has not worked with or played with a Apache Cassandra or DataStax Enterprise. However we have a number of courses throughout the day that delve into more specific details and advanced topics. There are three specific tracks:
Cassandra Track – this track consists of three workshops: Core Cassandra, Cassandra Data Modeling, and Cassandra Application Development. [more details]
DSE Track – this track consists of three workshops: DataStax Enterprise Search, DataStax Enterprise Analytics, and DataStax Enterprise Graph. [more details]
Bonus Content – This track has two workshops: DataStax Enterprise Overview and DataStax Enterprise Operations and Security. [more details]
Why would you want to attend?
One huge rad awesome reason is that the developer day events are FREE. But really, nothing is ever free right? You’d want to take a day away from the office to join us, so there’s that.
You also might want to even stay a little later after the event as we always have a solidly enjoyable happy hour so we can all extend conversations into the evening and talk shop. After all, working with distributed databases, managing data, and all that jazz is honestly pretty enjoyable when you’ve got awesome systems like this to work with, so an extended conversation into the evening is more than worth it!
You’ll get a firm basis of knowledge and skillset around the use, management, and more than a few ideas about how Apache Cassandra and DataStax Enterprise can extend your system’s systemic capabilities.
You’ll get a chance to go beyond merely the distributed database system of Apache Cassandra itself and delve into graph, what it is and how it works, analytics, and search too. All workshops take a look at the architecture, uses, and what these capabilities will provide your systems.
You’ll also have one on one time with DataStax engineers, and other technical members of the team to ask questions, talk about architecture and solutions that you may be working on, or generally discuss any number of graph, analytics, search, or distributed systems related questions.
Where are the current DataStax Developer Day events that have been held, and were future events are going to be held? So far we’ve held events in New York City, Washington DC, Chicago, and Dallas. We’ve got two more events scheduled with one in London, England and one in Paris, France.
Future events? With a number of events completed and a few on the calendar, we’re interested in hearing about future possible locations for events. Where are you located and where might an event of this sort be useful for the community? I can think of a number of cities, but organizing them into order to know where to get something scheduled next is difficult, which is why the team is looking for input. So ping me via @Adron, email, or just send me a quick message from here.
I’m in the process (with the team I work with) of trying to figure out what would be most useful to you, the community and its members in which we all work. Whether you’re a coder, working toward being a coder, programmer, engineer, or whatever it is that you aim for we want to know what would help you out? I myself produce a ton of material that I personally find entertaining and fun to produce myself, and hope it’s useful for people. So – if you would, take a moment and answer these few questions. Thanks and cheers!
I just wrapped up a long weekend of staycation. Monday kicked off Write the Docs this week and today, Tuesday, I’m getting back into the saddle.
Write the Docs
The Write the Docs Conference this week, a two day affair, has kicked off an expanding community around document creation. This conference is about what documentation is, how we create documentation as technical writers, writers, coders and others in the field.
Not only is it about those things it is about how people interact and why documentation is needed in projects. This is one of the things I find interesting, as it seems obvious, but is entirely not obvious because of the battle between good documentation, bad documentation or a complete lack of documentation. The later being the worse situation.
The Bloody War of Documentation!
At this conference it has been identified that the ideal documentation scenario is that building it starts before any software is even built. I do and don’t agree with this, because I know we must avoid BDUF (Big Design Up Front). But we must take this idea, of documentation first, in the appropriate context of how we’re speaking about documentation at the conference. Just as tests & behaviors identified up front, before the creation of the actual implementation is vital to solid, reliable, consistent, testable & high quality production software, good documentation is absolutely necessary.
There are some situations, the exceptions, such as with agencies that create software, in which the software is throwaway. I’m not and don’t think much of the conference is about those types of systems. What we’ve been speaking about at the conference is the systems, or ecosystems, in which software is built, maintained and used for many years. We’re talking about the APIs that are built and then used by dozens, hundreds or thousands of people. Think of Facebook, Github and Twitter. All of these have APIs that thousands upon thousands use everyday. They’re successful in large part, extremely so, because of stellar documentation. In the case of Facebook, there’s some love and hate to go around because they’ve gone between good documentation and bad documentation. However whenever it has been reliable, developers move forward with these APIs and have built billion dollar empires that employ hundreds of people and benefit thousands of people beyond that.
As developers that have been speaking at the conference, and developers in the audience, and this developer too all tend to agree, build that README file before you build a single other thing within the project. Keep that README updated, keep it marked up and easy to read, and make sure people know what your intent is as best you can. Simply put, document!
You might also have snarkily asked, does Write the Docs have docs,why yes, it does:
Today while using my iPhone, catching up on news & events over the time I had my staycation I took a photo. On that photo I used Stitch to put together some arrows. Kind of a Portland Proper Brew (PPB) with documentation. (see what I did there!) It exemplifies a great way to start the day.
Everyday I bike (or ride the train or bus) in to downtown Porltand anywhere from 5-9 kilometers and swing into Barista on 3rd. Barista is one of the finest coffee shops, in Portland & the world. If you don’t believe me, drag your butt up here and check it out. Absolutely stellar baristas, the best coffee (Coava, Ritual, Sightglass, Stumptown & others), and pretty sweet digs to get going in the morning.
I’ll have more information on a new project I’ve kicked off. Right now it’s called Bike n’ Hack, which will be a scavenger style code hacking & bicycle riding urban awesome game. If you’re interested in hearing more about this, the project, the game & how everything will work be sure to contact me via twitter @adron or jump into the bike n’ hack github organization and the team will be adding more information about who, what, where, when and why this project is going to be a blast!
I’m sitting on the train heading from Seattle to Portland today. I live in Portland, but spend a significant amount of time in the beautiful Emerald City. The time on the train is immensely useful to think about concepts, thoughts, introspect, code and generally be uninterrupted in focus. All the while it makes the 3 plus hour trip productive for me. I don’t waste a single minute fidgeting about uselessly in a car. It’s win, win, win and win on all accounts. But enough about the trip and these pleasantries, I’ve got some ranting to do! I want to tell you what is being doen wrong in business, in software and in general in the community around software developers.
1. Stop Listening to PR (Public Relations) when speaking to Developer Communities
PR can serve an important purpose for certain things, but if you’re speaking through PR to the software developers’ community you’ve screwed up. You’ve screwed up big time. I’ll step into dangerous waters and say it is often a good idea to either get advocates (or evangelists) or marketers to speak to developers but the second PR is involved – you’re going to be dead in the water.
In the case of marketing & advocates, they need to know where and how to interact well with the developer community. Developers can smell crappy marketing lines a thousand miles away, so when delivering messaging to the community, it needs to be on point, informative, without the buzz word bingo. Take for instance this gem I heard recently:
Vertically integrated incentivized synergies.
A simple response to that is, “WTF, unfollow, unsubscribe, get outta here.”
Conversations have to be real and honest, if there isn’t any experience, skills or knowledge in the marketing or advocacy team, it’s best to own up to that ASAP and ask the community what information they’d like to receive from X company.
Let’s take a few great examples – and yes, I’m going to outline real companies doing things right. I’m not going to harp on companies doing things wrong, because the developer community knows painfully well who these companies are. Those companies can consider this a PSA.
Full disclosure, I provide consulting, development how-to & blog entries as a consultant.
New Relic takes several avenues in messages to developers. They’re really good at this and it shows in their honesty, integrity and reputation among the community itself.
Blogging: New Relic has a blog (yes, I write there also) that is informative on many levels. Not just a blog that churns out marketing things about their own products, but instead a blog full of useful information about events, products, other company’s that partner with New Relic, community coding and hackathon events and all sorts of additional articles. The key here, is the New Relic Blog is actually useful to the developer community. Two great example here are the “Nerd Economy” which was just a fun entry, and the “Rails Rumble” involvement New Relic had. This is what makes it an extremely valuable asset to the community, to New Relic itself, and to individual programmers & operations people as well!
New Relic’s Blog – click to go there and have a read.
Full disclosure, I’m friends with a number of people here now thanks to RICON and because of their excellent interactions in the developer community, see here and here for more on RICON.
Blogging: Basho is another company that is doing this well. They’re focused primarily on partners, events related to OSS and Basho (such as Riak) and has a fair breadth of topics overall. This keeps people coming back, and makes the articles useful to the community. A great example is their activity around the Rails Rumble and the Basho Docs Update. Again, that recurring theme, the articles must be useful. No one should ever just stick marketing spiel into a blog entry and post it.
2. Do NOT waste our time (or yours), we’re overbooked already!
Try to connect events together with other companies and provide them as such. Give multiple reasons to come to conferences, meet ups or otherwise get out the door. If there isn’t reasonable reason to physically be somewhere, make it an online event, chat or some other type of communication. Better yet, in many cases, write up some documentation and let us developers RTFM! But whatever marketing departments advocates and evangelists are doing, please coordinate a bit more so us developers (especially those that are writing a ton of app code) don’t spin our wheels getting value out of events.
From my personal perspective, I make it a point to help as many community members that organize meet ups and all to bring additional value – and if there isn’t enough value to merge with other groups. Bringing diverse backgrounds and polyglot ideals to a group isn’t a bad idea. Stay mono-lingual is a sure way when language priorities shift you won’t lose your community base. Now I’m going to harp on some groups that destroyed themselves, but eventually transformed by merging into other groups.
In Seattle & the Redmond area there used to be 3 (and I even have heard rumors of 4) .NET User Groups. With the advent of the extremely high value and dominance of the polyglot programmer (not that they were ever under-valued or anything). They all have since disappeared, but in very different ways. One lost because of a lack of content, then decreasing number of speakers, and eventually it died – completely. Another one actually ceased to exist because it merged into a group fo people that got involved in a number of other meetups that bridged development with a lot of other interests the attendees had. The last group actually polymorphed (eh, see what I did there with that programming term!) into a completely new group that is more open, more polyglot and fairly interesting. This is a perfect case of dropping a single tie to a single thing and branching out – or fading into nothing.
3. Don’t tell us not to communicate with our community!
Oh dear there is no better way to stifle innovation and favorable reputation of your software and products than to disallow your own company’s developers to publicly talk about it. It is absurd to kill this. The only company that I know, in the history of software, that has done this successfully is Amazon. But even Amazon only does it strategically. The companies that have done this completely are either dead or on their way to dying. To some degree Apple does this a little, but even in a tight lipped ship like Apple have developers talk about how or why they build things the way they do. They’re very proud of what they’ve built and they want to tell people.
The developers in a company are the absolutely best advocates for the products out of everybody. They may not be able to get out in the public, or even go out in public, but when they do and when they communicate if you’re running a good ship, that has proud developers, the community will know. Don’t forget either, there’s a few million us, that’s a force to be reckoned with in the market.
3.14159265359 Developers are indeed the king makers, don’t treat us like pawns!
RedMonk pointed out a while ago that “Meet the New King Makers: Same as the Old Kingmakers“. They’re on message, on target and very accurate as usual. If you want advice, information and a better understanding of the developer community, RedMonk is the analyst firm to check out for software development, you can forget the others.
I know there are dev shops out there that are amazing. There are dev shops out there that are atrocious. However those bad shops often suffer from heavy turnover, bad recruitment practices and even outright lying sometimes. It’s a bad situation, but just know if you hone your skills, communication skills and related abilities you as a developer won’t have to deal with those companies once you’ve cut your teeth in the industry.
To those dev shops that are meat grinders. You pay a heavy price, heavier than you might realize. Here’s why.
Turnover is ridiculously expensive. Many estimates range from 0.25x as much to 60x more expensive than maintain a solid team, good environment and positive conditions. Use google, read about it, turnover is a bad thing in many, many ways. (the rule of moderation does apply here)
A company with bad practices will NEVER, forget what you THINK you get, but the company will never achieve any type of competitive speed, quality or velocity of development compared to a dev shop that treats their developers well.
You will continuously create poorly designed interfaces, user experience and generally create a negative environment in which to operate, the company will never acheive its true potential. Developers are notorious for telling it like it is, if you make them unhappy, trust me when I say your entier company and the company’s reputation will be known very quickly among the developer community. Not only will you have to hire from outside of the area, you likely won’t be able to get A Game coders ever. They simply will not exist for a meat grinder shop.
There are ways for this to be remedied, but it is a very hard road to travel, far harder than any technical challenge to face. This challenge also takes, at minimum, years to truly fix once it has happened. So fix it, stop hiring warm bodies and work at being a good place for human beings to work.
Call it a hackathon, coder session, workshop, or whatever. What it is not, is a presentation. What am I talking about? A user group effort that I’m working, and mentioned recently regarding coders uniting, on with others that will be centered around doing something, a range of things, during a specific time frame, to expand one’s knowledge, skills, or help mentor on the specific thing that is being worked on. Instead of me going on and on with an explanation, I’ll describe a scenario from this new user group.
Vote, Group, Create!
First a conversation kicks off a thread (sign up to kick off a thread yourself). From that thread a topic arrises that people want to work with, work on, learn more about, and try to implement. Recently one of these topics that has come up is Continuous Deployment. The idea has been batted around now for a few weeks and it is ripe for a meet up and for a group to get together and actually implement a solution. This is a perfect example of something that can be implemented in a set time, with a group of people, individuals can then take that knowledge and go forth to make their development shops better.
So join the e-mail list, help us come up with ideas, and we’ll see you at an upcoming meet up and we’ll build something awesome!
Today while using my iPhone, catching up on news & events over the time I had my staycation I took a photo. On that photo I used Stitch to put together some arrows. Kind of a Portland Proper Brew (PPB) with documentation. (see what I did there!) It exemplifies a great way to start the day.
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