Folks, (Initially meant for User , but realized after I wrote it , it’s more sausage making talk which en users probably don’t care about)
I took on a bunch of work and finally starting to get my head out of the sand and realized I failed to deliver on some promises last year I made to myself and others to contribute to this community. I wanted to resurface a few thoughts on which I would like to contribute. We had a conversation on here a while ago to try doing a virtual conference.. which I think is a bit too ambitious. I also spoke to Dinesh last year briefly about doing periodic development meetings which focused on the development planning and execution. I’d like to help this project but I don’t know where to start. I tried getting some Jr. members internally at Anant who had time to make fixes on content and docs but it didn’t get looked at or reviewed so they lost interest. There’s only so much they would want to do based on my requests. The failure to deliver on better documentation organization was mainly mine because I didn’t commit enough time into it. I don’t think our community does a good enough job communicating the Cassandra value proposition to the enterprise community whether they are developers, architects, or directors. I’ve been meeting with many folks that haven’t touched their clusters since installing 2.1 (because it’s pretty damn good for most people!). When I ask them why, it’s a combination of team member churn but also because the knowledge is not as accessible. This year as January closes I am recommitting myself to some ideas and would LOVE your feedback. If somethings like this are in progress, I will help. 1. Cassandra Lunch - I’ve been seeing a colleague getting together with his fellow practitioners for a weekly “Sitecore Lunch” and I found it a very easy way to get people talking that normally wouldn’t be interacting with each other in realtime. 2. Coordinated Remote Meetup - I think this would be way easier to organize and get cross promoted as a quarterly event with the help of local organizers. I’m currently organizing DC / Chicago and have been cross promoting virtual talks to both and have gotten a good show with people curious about Cassandra. 3. Documentation - I know I said I’d help last year. I underestimated my free time and over estimated my capacity to focus. That being said , this is one of my passions and I help a lot of orgs get their [blank] together on how to manage their people, process, info and systems and the first thing is always knowledge management. If there’s someone I can shadow and apprentice under to help with Cassandra.Apache.org I really want to help revitalize our site. These may still be overestimating my capacity but I’m willing to fail and try again. :) rahul.xavier.si...@gmail.com http://cassandra.link The Apache Cassandra Knowledge Base.