Recent Blog Posts

• Month One For Technical Evangelists At Basho
• Posted on 06 Nov 2012

• Technical Evangelists are on the front lines of Riak adoption at Basho. Here's what they work on during their first month.

• Towards A Community Of Distributed Systems Developers
• Posted on 31 Aug 2012

• RICON is our first opportunity to bring together a community of distributed systems developers in the flesh. And we're damn excited about it.

• Hiring A Technical Evangelist in the Midwest
• Posted on 23 May 2012

• I'm looking for a Technical Evangelist based (approximately) in the Midwest to join me, Tom Santero, and the rest of the distributed Basho Team in our mission to bring Riak and the rest of Basho's open source technology to developers.

• Riak Adoption - We Have Some Work To Do
• Posted on 24 Apr 2012

• Early last week I read a blog post about the software adoption funnel from Donnie Berkholz, one of the stellar analysts over at RedMonk. Shortly thereafter I sent a message off to the Riak Mailing list asking what Basho needed to do to drive more Riak adoption.

• Building Healthy Distributed Systems
• Posted on 27 Jan 2012

• Distributed systems aren't limited to the world of computing. Companies and communities, for example, are also distributed networks of resources. This talk is a high-level look at computers, companies, and communities as distributed systems with a focus on why maintaining their health is crucial if they are to scale.

• Spend 15 Minutes On A Mailing List - A Challenge
• Posted on 14 Dec 2011

• Open source is free. And you don’t owe anyone anything for using it. Ever. But, in the name of participation and community goodwill, I’m issuing the following challenge ...

• A Nice Touch From Meetup.com
• Posted on 09 Dec 2011

• I spent yesterday and today setting up and announcing a new meetup we are getting off the ground called BashoChats. The purpose of BashoChats is to help build out the distributed systems community in and around they Bay Area. Basho is deeply invested in the future of distributed systems in practice, and along with companies like Boundary, (who, I have to admit, gave me the idea to start BashoChats), I have to say the future is looking bright for bringing what has been, to date, a largely academic pursuit into the lives of more developers ...

• Need a Videographer, DJ, or Photographer? Call These People
• Posted on 10 Nov 2011

• The Riak 1.0 Release Party would not have been complete without the handful of vendors we used to make it special. Specifically, I’m talking about the videographer, DJ, and photographer. So, I wanted to take a second to recommend them to anyone in the Bay Area who might be in the market for their services.

• Survey For Open Source Developers About Mailing List Expectations
• Posted on 19 Oct 2011

• One of the things that keeps me up at night is issues that come into the mailing list and go without getting some type of meaningful response. It pains me when questions or issue goes unanswered. Developers have too many choices for solid, functional open offerings these days in just about every part of their stack for us not to value their participation and usage, and for a community to not be responsive means they run the risk of losing newcomers and existing users ...

• A Cost/Benefit Analysis of the Ripple Hackathon
• Posted on 09 Aug 2011

• From July 11 - 13, Basho Developer Advocate Sean Cribbs and the majority of the Ripple Committers descended upon BashoWest for the first official Ripple Hackathon. This was three full days of intense work, discussion, and collaboration around Riak's Ruby Client. After the event was over we took some time to put together a "cost/benefit analysis" to demonstrate that what we did was worthwhile and should be repeated in the future ...

• Building and Maintaining Community and Culture at a Distributed Company
• Posted on 27 Jun 2011

• Hiring where the talent is means we don't sacrifice great hires for location, but it also presents various hurdles when attempting to build culture and community. Anyone who works at a startup or as part of a small team can speak to the importance culture. It's crucial that distributed employees feel as though they are part of a tight-knit ...

• Two Anecdotes About Community From JSConf and NodeConf
• Posted on 18 May 2011

• Basho recently sponsored JSConf and NodeConf, a combined four days of amazing talks, parties and events that took place the first week of May in Portland, Oregon. Chris, Laura, and Virginia Williams, Mikeal Rogers, and all the other organizers did an unbelievable job with the conferences, and I'm proud to say that Basho were a part of making it happen ...

• A Few Suggestions To Bring GitHub More Users And Money
• Posted on 31 Mar 2011

• I'm a Community Manager. My long days and sleepless nights aren't spent writing code. Instead, I'm tasked explicitly with monitoring, tracking and growing the open source activity that exists around projects like Riak ...

• Why Do People "Watch" Code? Survey Results Edition
• Posted on 03 Feb 2011

• A few weeks ago I dashed off a post called "Why Do People "Watch" Code? A Short Survey For Open Source Developers." I had been spending some time attempting to pin down the significance of GitHub Watchers ...

• Why Do People "Watch" Code?
• Posted on 20 Jan 2011

• As community manager for various open source projects at Basho, I spend a lot of time thinking about community growth. Questions like "How fast is Riak growing compared to similar projects in the space?" and ...

• What's Missing in the NoSQL Space
• Posted on 08 Dec 2010

• The NoSQL space is awash in commentary and publications. This is a very good thing. It means that there is enough interest and usage of these technologies to necessitate regular reporting ...

• Using Open Source to Promote Sustainable Farming
• Posted on 23 Sep 2010

• One of the inevitable and immensely positive side effects of being the Community Manager at Basho Technologies has been taking a keen interest in other open source projects championed by members of our community ...

• What I Learned From Organizing The First Riak Meetup
• Posted on 20 Aug 2010

• A Community Manager for an open source project has a laundry-list lot of responsibilities ("wears a lot of hats," if you will), and this list only gets longer when you work at a startup ...

• Why I Write the Riak Recap Every Day
• Posted on 17 Jul 2010

• The Riak Recap is, by all accounts, a very small blip on the overall community radar screen. But, it's something that has worked quite well for Riak and those who follow it ...

• Big Table in the House of Balmer
• Posted on 01 Jul 2010

• The Boston Chapter of NoSQL Summer kicks off tonight at Microsoft's New England Research Development Center...