Today, I finished writing comprehensive documentation for djigger. Although the tool has no secrets for me, I believe writing proper documentation is always a challenge. I also try to approach it in a way that is as exciting as possible. I try to put myself in the shoes of the reader/user, and sort of reverse engineer who that person might be, what content they would expect to find, in what order and whether they're going to succeed at using and understanding the tool.
One thing I've learnt is it sounds easy but it's a difficult process that's oft neglected. Neglected by developers who have much more fun writing code than documentation but also neglected by the users themselves, on the receiving end, because they have very limited patience (and rightfully so) and if your docs are low quality, instead of providing that feedback you need so badly, they'll just move on. We all know that. Everything works that way these days. And with each day and each engineer working towards better software and better documentation, presentation, etc, the patience budget of our average user decreases.
So I was happy to take on that challenge and I have to say I believe I did a pretty good job in that first batch of documents. There aren't too many pages, the pages don't seem excessively long to me, and I believe I've covered every feature available in R1.4.2. I took the time to take step-by-step screenshots and really illustrate my points precisely.
On that page, I also took the time to summarize the way Q&A's usually go when I present the tool to someone who's never used it, and I basically laid out the entire philosophy behind djigger. As I've stated, there are litterally thousands of hours of performance analysis behind that project, and it's important to me to show that, because I believe that's the true value we're bringing to you as a user. It goes well beyond the simple java program that we developed. Hopefully people will see that and hopefully they'll want to interact with us, as a result.
So with that, I really hope people will be able to get started with the tool and get answers to as many questions as possible. Of course, everyone is welcome to provide us with their feedback via our contact page. We'll try to answer all of your questions there too, whether they're about denkbar, djigger, technical points, our experience with APMs, everything.
Another quick update I wanted to make today is that we're currently working on publishing a road map for the next months in which the upcoming improvements and additional features of djigger will be documented. I'm not sure just yet when that'll be published (there are still conversations to be had internally) but we'll probably update djigger's page directly when it's ready.
If I have time today, I'm going to start working on the development of a reproducer (a small program destined to showcase a problem and a solution to that problem) that will allow me to illustrate a case study involving djigger and based on past experience at one of my clients in France.
The other project I have is the creation of a youtube channel in which I'll be posting video tutorials on a regular basis.
EDIT: I've added a first video which will show you how to use djigger in sampler mode here.
Those videos will essentially duplicate the content written in our docs and case studies, but will be a more dynamic, (hopefully) fun-to-watch experience, in which people will be able to follow and visualize every step of the logic behind the tutorial and more generally, behind the denkbar initiative and djigger. I might start with a short one covering the installation steps of djigger on the different platforms and how to use the different connectors we made available (see our installation page here for more details).
Remember, you can download djigger v1.4.2 for free at anytime by clicking here, read the documentation I wrote here, check out the release page of our github repository here, visit our website at http://denkbar.io or contact us via this page.
Signing off from Le Bonhomme.
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