May 4, 2010
Our Challenge
There is nothing easy about making software simple to learn and understand. Every potential user has different nuances to their learning styles, and this makes for a hard road to simple usage. This is especially true with Riak.
Internally at Riak, we are constantly addressing questions like, “How do we make a ‘distributed, Dynamo-inspired key/value store’ inviting and less daunting to first time users?” and “How do we lower the barrier to adoption and usage?” Though resources like the Riak Mailing List, the Riak Wiki, and Riak IRC channel are great, we kept asking ourselves, “What can we do to make it dead simple for those new to and interested in Riak to learn about it and how it works?”
Our answer (in part) is the Riak Fast Track.
What is the Riak Fast Track?
The Fast Track is an interactive module on the Riak Wiki that, through a combination of concise content and brief screencasts, will bring you up to speed on a) what Riak is, b) what its key features and benefits are, and c) how to use it.
As I stated above, the Fast Track is aimed at developers who may be new to Riak or those who may have heard about it in passing but haven’t spent too much time fiddling with it.
Is it exhaustive? No. Will you be an Riak expert after an hour? No. But, at the end of it, you should be able to tell your friends that you performed a JavaScript MapReduce query on historical stock data distributed over a three node Riak cluster on you local machine. If that’s not cool then I don’t know what is!
Your Challenge
We put a lot of time into making this, but there are undoubtedly some kinks that need to be worked out. And, regardless of how long we try to tweak and refine it, there will always be some small aspects and details that we aren’t going to get right. It is for that reason that we are appealing to you, the rapidly-growing Riak Community, to help us.
So, here is the challenge: Take 45 minutes and go through the Riak Fast Track. Then, when you’re done, take five minutes to write us an email and tell us what you thought about it. That’s it.
We are looking for answers to questions like:
- Was it effective?
- Did you learn anything?
- What did we get right?
- What did we get wrong?
- What should we add/remove?
And, to sweeten the pot, we are going to send a “Riak Swag Pack” (contents of which are top secret) to everyone who sends us their review and thoughts on the Fast Track by the close of business on Tuesday (5/11) of next week. It doesn’t have to be anything extensive (though we love details). A simple, “I liked x, y, and z, but you could have done this better” would suffice. You can send your emails to mark@riak.com. I am looking forward to hearing from you!
So, without further ado, go forth and test out the Riak Fast Track.
We hope you’ll find it useful and we’re looking forward to your thoughts on how to make it better.
Best,
