As mentioned previously, I like getting my little gamification rewards and I have been meaning to add new content here for quite some time. In order to kill two birds with one stone, I took a couple of my ideas and turned them into the Q&A format that is encouraged on StackOverflow and the DBA StackExchange site. Hence we now have these two new questions (and answers): How to Programmatically Pre-Split a GUID Based Shard Key with MongoDB How to Determine Chunk Distribution (data and number of docs) in a Sharded MongoDB Cluster?

I recently realised I had become a bit obsessed with increasing my StackOverflow reputation – hardly a surprise really given how close it is to the gaming concept of XP and leveling, which has caused large parts of my life to disappear into a black hole (Civ and WoW, I am looking at you). I have been helping out on SO, mainly on the MongoDB side of things there since I joined 10gen and it has been a great learning experience as well as a great tool to use, the self moderation means that the questions (and I hope, my answers) are generally well formed and potentially useful to others.