February 8, 2010
First week in the new office
Last week was our first week in our new office in Old Downtown Oakland. It's a really neat area with lots of restaurants and bars, and hardly any murders.
Oh yeah, we've changed our name to Couchio. Our new blog will be here http://blog.couch.io/ soon.
Our office:
Our office manager Claire:
Chris and Mikeal:
Claire and Jan:
Nitin:
Super Awesome Art by Julie Armbruster:
Me:
My Office:
So far we are really disorganized and discombobulated. But I'm are working on it! I even bought Management for Dummies. Things will be running smoothly in no time ;)
Also we are looking hard for someone to help us offer CouchDB support and hopefully build a whole support organization. Email me damien@couch.io if you are interested or know someone who is.
December 16, 2009
Preschools in/near Piedmont?
Anyone know of a good preschool in/near Piedmont CA accepting applications for January? This is for our 2 year old girl, born Aug 2007.
December 12, 2009
Relaxed Inc.
So something interesting happened recently.
I, Jan, and Chris are building a startup around Apache CouchDB and Redpoint Ventures has invested $2 million. Pretty cool huh?
What are we going to do with that? Well, we are still figuring that out. For the most part we are going to try to grow a large and healthy CouchDB ecosystem and then build our own business(es) within that. We are working with Satish Dharmaraj on some basic strategy stuff right now, and we aren't trying to be secretive or "stealthy" as TechCrunch said. It's just very early and I'm also very busy planning a move. Which bring me to my 2nd and 3rd announcements.
2nd Announcement: Yes, I've left IBM.
To the projects at IBM using CouchDB, please continue to feel free contact me at anytime. IBM has been very good to me and the CouchDB project and I want IBM and its customers to be successful. That hasn't changed.
To Anant Jhingran, David Fallside and especially Sam Ruby, thank you for your early support and getting IBM behind CouchDB. We'd never have made it this far without you.
3rd Announcement: California here we come! I, Laura, and our 5 yo, 2 yo, and 9 mo (for those counting at home, that's 5 people) are moving to Piedmont CA the first week of January. We have everything all settled, other than a million small details that Laura has to deal with.
We still need some recommendations for a good local family doctor, ophthalmologist and dentist. And does any know where you can get them to convert your car to a lowrider that goes bouncy bouncy down the street?
Anyway, exciting times ahead. Follow me, Chris and Jan on twitter as we figure all this stuff out.
October 29, 2009
Koala on the loose!
Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala has just been released. This is big news as this version includes Apache CouchDB, used as a replicable database by desktop apps. This means CouchDB will be on over 10 million desktops. Nice :)
"CouchDB Implements a Fundamental Algorithm"
Chris Anderson, an Apache CouchDB contributor, writes a great article about the core design of CouchDB:
CouchDB Implements a Fundamental Algorithm
October 23, 2009
Mozilla Raindrop
Mozilla has announced the Raindrop project today, a new messaging platform built on top of Apache CouchDB:
A central principle behind Raindrop is that messaging should be personal -- we want Raindrop to be people-centric both in how we process messages, and in how we can help give people control over their personal data and experiences.
This is a huge deal for me and for CouchDB. I can't describe how proud I am of this.
October 13, 2009
"Agile is treating the symptoms, not the disease"
Where is this decade's Access?It may seem like a snarky and trolling question, but think about it for a moment: for a decade or so, I was brought into project after project that was designed to essentially rebuild/rearchitect the Access database created by one of the department's more tech-savvy employees into something that could scale beyond just the department.
(Actually, in about half of them, the goal wasn't even to scale it up, it was just to put it on the web. It was only in the subsequent meetings and discussions that the issues of scale came up, and if my memory is accurate, I was the one who raised those issues, not the customer. I wonder now, looking back at it, if that was pure gold-plating on my part.)
Others, including many people I care about (Rod Paddock, Markus Eggers, Ken Levy, Cathi Gero, for starters) made a healthy living off of building "line of business" applications in FoxPro, which Microsoft has now officially shut down. For those who did Office applications, Visual Basic for Applications has now been officially deprecated in favor of VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office), a set of libraries that are available for use by any .NET application language, and of course classic Visual Basic itself has been "brought into the fold" by making it a fully-fledged object-oriented language complete with XML literals and LINQ query capabilities.
Which means, if somebody working for a small school district in western Pennsylvania wants to build a simple application for tracking students' attendance (rather than tracking it on paper anymore), what do they do?
http://www.javaworld.com/community/node/3530
That last question is the one that interests me more than just about anything else you can ask.
Apache CouchDB 0.10.0 Escapes!
Our first beta!
Get it here: http://couchdb.apache.org/downloads.html
There should be another interesting CouchDB related announcement later today.
October 6, 2009
Awesome InfoWorld CouchDB Article
CouchDB emerging as a top choice for offline Web apps
September 29, 2009
Oh yeah, I'm on the Twitter now
Follow me here: http://twitter.com/damienkatz
