

Damian Katz - Why he decided to create couchDB  - dantheman
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/katz-couchdb-and-me

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ahpeeyem
I didn't expect to find inspiration to follow your dreams and do something
that really matters to you in this video, but it's a great insight into the
self-doubt Katz experienced while he took his family off to another state and
lived off savings to create something awesome.

Really interesting presentation and I love the hand-drawn slides!

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dantheman
Agreed, you could really see the emotion in face/voice when he was describing
what he went through.

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zupatol
I found no transcript so I'll try a short summary, although I'm already
forgetting the beginning.

Damien Katz worked on lotus notes, later he had a startup, from which he was
fired. He started looking jobs but regular jobs didn't seem to interest him
anymore. He believed he was a competent programmer, but felt that he could
contribute more. He decided to live on his savings and build something before
knowing what he was going to build. His wife liked the idea of living
differently. He soon dropped his first idea which turned out to be horribly
complex to realize. He then tried to somehow extract the essence of what was
useful in lotus notes, leaving aside the unnecessary complexity, switched from
c++ to erlang along the way, and ended up with couchdb. He was running out of
money, so he took up a job at mysql, (although he had never used mysql, and
barely knew sql). The development stopped until he took a break for the birth
of his second (or third?) child, and brought couchdb to a point where suddenly
ibm was interested in it. Negociating with ibm was so frustrating that he
ended up calling them douchebags in a mail. This led ibm to agree that couchdb
should be open source and to pay Damien Katz for working on it.

He says many more interesting and funny things.

I listened to it only once, without taking notes. Please correct me if I'm
wrong. (I posted this on reddit also)

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dantheman
This is a great presentation on how to build cool stuff, and the sacrifices he
made to do it.

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fortes
A good reminder that success doesn't always come overnight, or without
sacrifice.

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inovica
Good presentation. To be honest I didn't know of CouchDB. Looks quite cool.
Anyone using it on here and what are your experiences of it?

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dantheman
I'm using it and like it a lot. I'd say it's still relatively new and there
isn't mountains of documentation or examples so sometimes it takes a little
banging your head against the wall. I think it's still at the alpha stage,
though I think 0.9 will be considered beta.

For more information on couchDB: <http://couchdb.apache.org/>

