It’s easy for technologists to get lost in the technology. We’re around it so much, we start thinking like technicians.
Sitting at my favorite tea house the other day, I was picking Andy‘s brain about memcached, a back-end technology that’s really beyond the type of web work I usually do.
It turns out that what I thought was complicated is really rather simple. At least, it seemed that way after I read the caching story:
“Two plucky adventurers, Programmer and Sysadmin, set out on a journey. Together they make websites. Websites with webservers and databases. Users from all over the Internet talk to the webservers and ask them to make pages for them. The webservers ask the databases for junk they need to make the pages. Programmer codes, Sysadmin adds webservers and database servers.”
No, this isn’t a story that makes memcached accessible to the complete newbie. For a programmer who normally stays away from sysadmin tasks, likely a common memcached user, it’s spot-on. The story gives a perfect use case, adds personality and takes me quickly from knowing next-to-nothing to almost being able to implement it myself.
Other Open Source projects could stand to learn from this. Heck, so could any technology that requires documentation. This stuff isn’t just for marketers.
What do you wish came with its own story?
Nice once, Adam.