November 06, 2012
// This is an excerpt from Basho's Technical Evangelist Handbook, // our internal documentation for new, existing, and aspiring TEs.
Basho's Community Team in the U.S. is composed of Technical Evangelists ("TEs"). They are developers whose job is to drive adoption of Riak. When needed, they may be called on to help sell software, but this isn't their primary objective. They are developers and ambassadors.
Here's what you should aim to accomplish throughout the course of your first month. This is a living guide, so change it at will if you have good reason. Above all, have fun and take pride in your work. You're on the front-lines for building community around the best open source database on the market.
Within The First Week
- Get on the Riak Users Mailing List; find and resolve three open issues
- Make yourself known in #riak on freenode
- Close two open issues against the Basho Docs repo
- Start to familiarize yourself with all of Basho's code. (Go slow and don't get overwhelmed. We have well over 200 repos at this point.)
Within The First Two Weeks
- (Re)read the Dynamo Paper
- Familiarize yourself with the road map for the next Riak release
- (Re)read the Valve Handbook
- Familiarize yourself with the Internal Dev Wiki
- Do a Riak code walk-through with a member of Dev
- Acquire an above-average understanding of MongoDB, HBase, Redis, Cassandra, Couchbase, Oracle, and MySQL (architecture, use cases, strengths/weaknesses, etc.)
Within The First Month
- Submit talks to at least two conferences (optimally about Riak but it's not required)
- Give an internal Riak Tech Talk to a local dev team (you'll be giving a lot of these...)
- Plan and hold a Riak Meetup in your city
- Pick a client library, write a Riak sample application with it and deploy it on EC2; open source the code; write a blog post about it (using KV, bonus points for using experimental branches (e.g. riak_dt, yokozuna))
- Write and publish a blog post about one piece of the Riak internals we haven't covered yet (e.g. "PW vs W" or "The lifecycle of a PUT request")
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Does this sound like a fun? Send and email to mark@basho.com. We're hiring TEs in Boston, LA, Chicago, DC, Austin, and various other major cities.
