RICON, the annual distributed systems conference, is next week! The TL;DR of this post is update or build a new demo on Riak products to enter to win. All the details are here:
- Details of the Community Competition
- Specific requirements of the demo
- Start your coding today!
Brace Yourself
Hundreds of people will come together to share, learn, and build as part of the Riak community next week. While that is a lot of smart people in one room, that means thousands more of those in our community will not be with us. This year, we’re introducing a friendly competition to connect these two groups together.
The first annual RICON Community Competition begins today! Whether you can join us in-person or will follow events online, you can share your code and win unique RICON 15 giveaways.
The Goal
RICON is a place where we share academic and operational knowledge. This idea is about getting us all in the mindset of sharing with the broader community. The competition is a great way to contribute to the distributed systems community of Riak users, open source developers, Erlang enthusiasts and contributors of all types.
The Competition
Build a demo application using one or more of the Riak products – Riak KV, Riak S2, Riak TS (still in private beta) or Riak Data Platform – that meet the following standards:
- Code that stores and retrieves data
- Has a user interface to “see” what’s happening (more on that below)
- Is written with care with common development practices: clear branching, code abstraction, reasonable security levels
User Interface?
Yes, every project — if it wants to win — will need to include some way of seeing how it works. This requirement can be achieved through something as easy as a -v functionality that verbosely outlines what it’s doing. It could be something as feature rich as the Sinatra app in front of the Zombie Riak project. No matter your approach, your code must have an easy-to-understand guide of what’s happening to be considered feature complete.
The Judges
There are two awards to win: Best Demo RICON 2015 and People’s Choice Award.
Best Demo Award
All participants will be rated by a panel of users lead by the new Taishi members. The 3 categories of review will be:
- Completeness – project checks off each of the points under Objective above
- Documentation – README.md (feel free to copy existing ones) and details on how it works
- Creativity – Does it make us smile? That x-factor that you can’t put a number on
Specific questions will be made public in the community-comp-ricon15.md file. Feel free to review them!
People’s Choice Award
We want the community at large to vote for what they see as the most fun, exciting and interesting demo of the competition. All competitors that meet the minimum requirements of the competition are eligible to win.
To participate, anyone can give a :+1: to projects on the GitHub Issue, which will tally up toward this award! Here are the details:
- Go to this open Issue in our Riak Community repo: http://bit.ly/ricon15comp
- When you see someone’s work you want to vote for, write why on the issue and tag them in it!
- To do so, use the ‘@’ symbol followed by their account name
- You can vote on multiple demos!
- Only one vote per person per demo
- Get others to vote for projects you like by sharing it through social media. If you’re using Twitter, use the #RICON15 hashtag
3 Demo Ideas
Since you’re taking the time to read this post, I want to give you a hint on projects we would love to see updated in new and creative ways:
- Add updates to Zombie Riak to leverage Riak 2.x features (or BDP!)
- Update Riak Didgeridoo to play distributed music
- Build a session store that shows you the session store! It’s an idea that we’ve discussed here
You Can Be There
If you are available to join us in San Francisco, buy your ticket to RICON and we’ll see you next week.
