Be Humble, and Get Shit Done!

I had the honor of speaking at JAOO, sorry GOTO, this year. Being part of so many great speakers, like James Gosling, Rich Hickey, Martin Fowler, Tim Bray, Michael Nygard, and Dan Ingalls (maker of several Smalltalk versions), made me feel nothing but humble, but not in a bad way. I talked about CouchDB, and if you care for it, check out my slides. This is my take away from the conference.

Why I Love and Hate Distributed Systems

Let me go ahead and say it: I love distributed systems. Why? Simply because they bend my brain. Yesterday I tweeted “Distributed databases are my happy place.” One response I got was along the lines of: “then you’re probably not running a distributed database in production.” Busted! But does it matter? We all love distributed stuff, we love thinking about scaling. They seem like problems everyone wants to have and solve.

10 Annoying Things About CouchDB

Hi, I’m Mathias, and I’m a CouchDB user. I’ve been using it for almost a year now, and we have a project using it in production, with a side of Redis. I think it’s an awesome database, some of its features are simply unrivaled. Offline replication, CouchApps, to name a few. CouchDB just hit version 1.0. It’s been a long time coming, with CouchDB having probably one of the longest histories in the non-relational database space. I’ve heard about it first back in September 2008, when Jan Lehnardt talked about it at a local co-working space. I still blame him for getting me all excited about this whole NoSQL thing. Fun fact: I bookmarked the CouchDB website back in February 2008.