Goals for 2011 – Early Update

It’s a bit early to be updating my goals for 2011, but I’m really excited about this one. Over the course of last week, I wrote an article about loading data into Riak. I had a brief conversation with Mark Phillips (blog | twitter) about adding some of the code to the Riak function contrib. This is where a sane person would say “Yeah, sure Mark, do whatever you want with my code.” Instead I said something like “I’d be happy to share. How about I make a generic tool?” About 40 minutes later I had a working chunk of code. 30 minutes after that I had refactored the code into a driver and alibrary. I wrote up some documentation and sent everything off to be included in the main Riak function contrib repository. A couple of days and a documentation correction later and you can now see my first code contribution to the open source world on the internet: Importing YAML. While I’m really excited about this, and it’s very important to me, there’s more to take away from this than just “Yay, I did something!” We’re all able to give something back to our community. In this case I took code I had written to perform benchmarks and extracted a useful piece of demonstration code from it. Share your knowledge with the world around you – it’s how we get smarte