HN Explorer

Ask HN: My MongoDB resources site Mongofu.com, good/bad?

20 points by sonnymai ↗ HN
Hey HN'ers,

I'm a long time reader, first time contributor. Anyway, this is a little project of mine, a place where people can post MongoDB related tutorials and questions. http://mongofu.com/

I've been working on this to develop some of my skills in webdev, something I want to move into later on I guess (currently a graduate telecoms engineer). So don't be gentle, be mean =).

Let me know what you think.

Cheers, Sonny Mai

http://mongofu.com/

12 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 32.7 ms ] thread
garyrichardson
Site looks fine. I hate sites that use a username instead of just an email address. Did you think about using OpenID or FB Connect?

I'd say that unless you can find a way to get a lot of content/traffic to the site, I'd stick with http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/mongodb or the Mongo Wiki.

sonnymai
Hey Gary, Yeh I agree with you on the point about not using an email, I've actually stuck that on my todo list last night after thinking about it. As for openId and fbconnect, I have plans to implementing these later on. I just wanted to launch it and see if it'll be useful to people first and refine it.

Thanks for your comments, much appreciated! =)

sonnymai
Sorry, missed your last point. I agree that stack overflow and mongo wiki are great resources and I'm not trying to replace these at all.

My aim is to have people post their tutorials and articles in a more centralised place. As for the occasional MongoDB question, perhaps it is better to post at stack overflow, we'll see how things play out and what people prefer.

Anyway, this is more of a instrument for me to learn to develop and manage a website anyway. Thanks again

buro9
Personally... thank you so much for not using Stack Overflow. I find it ugly and confusing with strong established characters drowning out others.

What I really like about what you've done is the aggregation from many sources. Potentially the one true place to look for everything Mongo and to follow progress of it. The reddit/HN model applied to a specific area of knowledge and specialised... can't wait for it to get traction.

It's nice. Well done. Now just to get a load of content in there.

benologist
Needs more resources!

I'd love to see tutorials that really spoon feed sharding and scaling it in various scenarios. The docs have a simple tutorial but it's brief and relies too heavily on "you'll understand it if you just do it". I want to use MongoDB but I don't want to wake up 3 months later and discover what I did was screw it up.

I'd also love to see articles that talk about what can go wrong and how to recover from it, and maintenance.

Generally just stuff that would prepare me and others to use MongoDB coming from no experience with nosql stuff.

sonnymai
hey benologist, hehe yes I agree it needs more resources. Thats why i'm hoping people will post up resources. I only made the site live 12 hours ago ;)

The mongodb commmunity is quite small right now I think, i'm sure it'll grow, and the amount of resources out there will grow with it. =)

_pius
I don't mean to sound like a jerk, but if you want your site to be successful, you'll do the legwork of seeding it with the many existing blog posts about MongoDB. There are plenty of resources out there and blaming the "quite small" MongoDB community for the lack of links on your site is not really accurate.
sonnymai
Hi Pius, no you're not a jerk at all and that is a very valid point that you make. I havn't had the time to do that in the last 12 hours since I launched it.

Feedback is what I want right now. =)

Thanks for the comment

_pius
Great, good concept and nice job on the site!
bl4k
It would be better to set up this resource as a wiki or on some sort of knowledge base platform rather than the digg/reddit style of news site. Good tutorials are always relevant, you don't want them scrolling down past the bottom of the page.

If you do setup a wiki, I would be more than happy to contribute tutorials on various topics. I have been using Mongo for a while now, and agree that the documentation needs work and more resources are needed for new users - so if there is a place where we could put that, count me in

sonnymai
Hi bl4k,

I understand your point about a wiki. For now, I don't want to host tutorials on Mongofu. I'd prefer people to host their own tutorials on their own blogs/websites and let others know of this through Mongofu.

Your second point, "good tutorials are always relevant"; I completely agree with you there and I'll sort out a vote/rank algorithm eventually. Perhaps a moderated static page to post these "great" resources.

Thanks for the feedback mate.

riprock
As a NoSQL newbie I would love to see this take off. Most tutorials only have simple schema examples like articles with tagging; I would prefer to see schema designs for large-scale applications. I've also always wondered...how big should you let a document grow before you decide it's better to make certain subdocuments a collection of their own? Nevertheless I'm looking forward to seeing this website grow to answer some questions :)