Riak Recap scratchpad

recap-1-12-15

Good morning, afternoon and evening everyone. 

I'm Matt Brender, new to Basho and focused on efforts out here in the open source portion of the Riak world. Tyler Hannan recommended that the very first task I take on is bringing back the Recap and Mark confirmed it was valuable to others. I hope you enjoy it.

# State of the Union

Since we haven't had one of these in a while, here is an update on the latest software we have available. 

* Riak is at [2.0.4](http://docs.basho.com/riak/latest/) with [1.4.12](http://docs.basho.com/riak/1.4.12/) available as well
* Riak CS is at [1.5.3](http://docs.basho.com/riakcs/latest/)

## Announcements

* I (Matt) have joined on as a Developer Advocate. If you're wondering who I am, you can check out this [blog post](http://neckbeardinfluence.com/pursuing-my-inner-neckbeard-headed-to-basho/) or ping me [on Twitter](https://twitter.com/mjbrender)
* The Riak Recap is back up and running. We're starting with the goal of every other week and will adjust based on feedback
* There's an open TODO of tracking unanswered questions coming across IRC & email. More to come on that
* Feedback is not just welcome, but is necessary. More ways of working on prioritization are in the plans. Send emails, tweets or otherwise to me in the meantime

## Event news

* We're co-hosting the [New Stack Meetup](http://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-new-stack-warmup-seattle-tickets-15244098509) on March 3rd in Seattle
* We have multiple Basho engineers speaking at [Erlang Factory](www.erlang-factory.com/sfbay2015/home#speakers) on 26-27 March
* We'll announce Meetup events in San Francisco and New York City in the next few weeks. Join any of [these groups](http://riak.meetup.com) to keep up with the news 

## Dev news

* I noticed some cool projects popping up for node.js developers, including `riak-mock-server` available [here](https://www.npmjs.com/package/riak-mock-server) along with some [very cool riak tools for node developers](https://www.npmjs.com/search?q=riak)

## Study material

* It's worth revisiting the [RICON 2014 videos](http://ricon.io/archive/2014/index.html) as we kick off the new year
* Our own [Christopher Meiklejohn](https://speakerdeck.com/cmeiklejohn) posted some incredible slides including [an introduction to Riak](https://speakerdeck.com/cmeiklejohn/introduction-to-riak) and [an introduction to webmachine](https://speakerdeck.com/cmeiklejohn/functional-web-apps-with-webmachine-1)

That's it for this round. Thanks for reading.