I've been involved in developing training materials, tutorials, videos, online documentation and even books. So I've gained a full appreciation of the effort involved in not only creating good documentation but maintaining it too. Rene Winkelmeyer wrote a good blog post today about developer experience and his points are very valid.
Over the last couple of years I've seen a number of approaches as I've dug into a variety of new technologies.
Since earlier this year when I started trying to get a better handle on the breadth of graph database options available for a developer, Titan has been an option I have kept in regular contact with. It's fair to say there has been a lot of uncertainty about the prospects for Titan. But there have been some interesting developments regarding Titan during the summer. IBM Graph has reached GA on Bluemix, albeit with only REST access, which may not appeal to Java developers, particularly those familiar with Titan and comfortable with natively handling vertices and edges. And more recently there has been a lot of work on integrating Titan with ScyllaDb, which provides a long-term option for using Thrift as a communication mechanism between Titan and the backend database.
The bulk of my experience with application development has been building workflow-related rich client and web applications on NoSQL databases, typically IBM Domino. The challenge in the Notes Client was to provide dashboard-style displays and a good way to display documents for action by the current individual. Private views can be used, but impact database performance. So, typically, the approach is to display views that present a scrollable table of data. Domino's document-level reader security is then used to ensure only the appropriate data is visible. If data is archived appropriately, performance of the database is good enough for many reasonably-sized applications. (Of course, archiving is often omitted from scope of the first phase for the rapidly-developed application, and becomes a case of "out of sight, out of mind".) But with the increasing prevalence of web applications replacing Notes Client applications, the ability to display "my documents" and use structured searches to display a targeted subset of documents was much easier.
Communication & transparency are critical to lifeblood of any community, open source or closed. Seeing impacts in more than one community
— Paul Withers (@PaulSWithers) 28 July 2016
Before I started working with IBM's XPages framework in 2009, I was starting to use AJAX calls in web applications and starting to dig into Dojo charting options for an application. So not unsurprisingly, when I started with XPages I blogged quite a bit about Dojo charts and understandably chose to write the Dojo-related chapter and a half of "XPages Extension Library". I also contributed a Dijit Tooltip custom control and an extension to the Dojo Legend component, to allow more sophisticated formatting of the legend.