Great idea!

-----Original Message-----
From: Alessandro Molina <alessan...@ursacomputing.com> 
Sent: Monday, June 21, 2021 11:34 AM
To: dev@arrow.apache.org
Subject: Apache Arrow Cookbook

Hi,

I'd like to share with the ML an idea which me and Nic Crane have been 
experimenting with. It's still in the early stage, but we hope to turn it into 
a PR for Arrow documentation soon.

The idea is to work on a Cookbook, a collection of ready made recipes, on how 
to use Arrow that both end users and developers of third party libraries can 
refer to when they need to look up "the arrow way" of doing something.

While the arrow documentation reports all features and functions that are 
available in arrow, it's not always obvious how to best combine them for a new 
user. Sometimes the solution ends up being more complicated than necessary or 
performs badly due to not obvious side effects like unexpected memory copies 
etc.

For this reason we thought about starting a documentation that users can refer 
to on how to combine arrow features to achieve the results they care about.

We wrote a short document explaining the idea at 
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v-jK_9osnLvAnAjLOM_frgzakjFhLpUi8OC0MlKpxzw/edit?usp=sharing

The core idea behind the cookbook is that all recipes should be testable, so it 
should be possible to add a CI phase for the cookbook that verifies that all 
the recipes still work with the current version of Arrow and lead to the 
expected results.

At the moment we started it in a separate repository ( 
https://github.com/ursacomputing/arrow-cookbook ), but we are yet unsure if it 
should live inside arrow/docs or its own directory (IE: arrow/cookbook) or its 
own repository. In the end it's fairly decoupled from the rest of Arrow and the 
documentation, which would have the benefit of allowing a dedicated release 
cycle every time new recipes are added (at least in the early phase).

We are also looking for more ideas about recipes that would be good candidates 
for inclusion, so if any of you has thoughts about which recipes we should add 
please feel free to comment on the document or reply by mail suggesting more 
recipes.

Any suggestion for improvements is appreciated! We hope to have something we 
can release with the next Arrow release.

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