Hello all my fellow Cassandra people. I have been working on a big rewrite of our Cassandra docs for a while. The current version released with 5 is "Just the facts" on several things. DataStax docs have filled in many gaps over the years, but a few developments have made me rethink our docs. 1) Since Lorena retired, there hasn't been the same focus on the in-tree docs. 2) Let's face it, LLMs have made docs WAY easier to generate and maintain. If you can point to the sweet spot for LLMs, generating docs is at the top of the list.
Now I need everyone's help getting this in-tree. What I have done is set up a temporary repo in my github as a workspace as I'm doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Since this is generating HTML, it will be easy for everyone to look and comment. Once I get to a good settling place, then I'll bring it over to trunk and get it published on our website. The big changes: The primary change has been in how the docs are presented. Before the docs were top-down and mostly reference. If you had a specific use case or need, it was up to you to figure out where in the docs the data was located. I've flipped that to be persona-based now. The 4 major buckets I've put things in are Developer, Operator, Contributor, and Reference. For example, Accord and ACID transactions have completely different focuses when talking to a developer or an operator. Each person will find what's relevant to them. In that, I added a lot more pages to each. The sources I took from were previous docs, CEPs, the actual code, presentations, and blogs over the years. I even used Jon Haddad's Cassandra agentic coding skills! (A huge help for validation) What I need now is people looking at and judging the output. I'm constantly reading and revising, but I need your input. The best thing I could ask for is to pick one thing you are the most opinionated about. Maybe it's UCS or repairs. A feature you worked on that isn't covered well. You pick. The way I would like you to look at it is "Is this enough information and I would share the link." If it needs more or is missing, let me know. Let's fix it today. Here is the review link: https://pmcfadin.github.io/cassandra6-docs-workzone/home/draft/index.html Some notes on navigation. You will see the different personas on the left hand nav. When you click on one, it changes the view. That's just how Antora works in this environment. In prod, it will be cleaner. To go back to the top level, just click the home icon. To communicate changes, you can either reply to this thread or start a convo in the #cassandra-comdev channel on ASF Slack. Or, you can private message me on whatever platform you choose. Thanks and looking forward to some awesome docs in Cassandra 6! Patrick
