

Inspiring talk on programming by creator of CouchDB - empone
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/katz-couchdb-and-me

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wallflower
In his personal, excellent talk (as the 1st commenter on Damien Katz's blog
post wisely notes), Damien Katz shares and talks about quitting to do a
startup when you are not young and single but older and responsible but still
have that startup urge on simmer/low.

Laura (his wife) and Damien's share their differing responses/perspectives on
what the personal/family risks were in the comments on his blog post below:

<http://damienkatz.net/2009/02/couchdb_and_me.html#comments>

In the beginning...

"Sell our house, live off the savings and build cool stuff... There were a lot
of reasons not just money...

The first was just educational - I had interests in a lot of areas. The first
was, distributed systems. I wanted to know more about them. I wanted to know
how to build them... It seems crazy but if you're going to go off and pursue a
Master's degree - you're going to quit your job, you're going to have to pay
your tuition - and there's no income - and the end of it you have a degree. An
Education...

It was about more family time. I had a beautiful one-year old and I didn't
want to spend all my time at the office, working on somebody else's crap...

I wanted to see what I could do...

And this is the reason why my wife was interested. It would be an interesting
story...

No wants to be wrapped up in this consumerist lifestyle, where if you have
money you spend it...It was a good thing it forced us to downsize...

I wish I had sort of a vision... It wasn't like that - it was just day after
day and letting it bubble into my consciousness...

The development process...It was really stressful once I decided I wanted to
build it because I didn't know _how to build it_...I couldn't see past all the
complexity...It just took a long time grinding at the problem, thinking about
it...

I really just went into a panic mode. I was thinking I was a total fraud, I
don't know what I'm building, I've got my family wrapped up into this - I
don't know how to build it - so I got on Amazon and ordered _Code Complete_ "

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dantheman
Agreed, here's a previous submission for past comments:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465653>

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ricree
He recently was interviewed on the StackOverflow podcast (
<http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/podcast-59/> ). A bit of repeated
material, but overall it was a fairly interesting program.

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nir
Awesome. I really hope this gets to front page.

