CouchCamp 2010

I spent a few days last week at CouchCamp, the first mass in-person gathering of the community around CouchDB. There were around 80 people from all over the world, which is pretty good turnout. The conference was largely in unconference format although there were some invited speakers, including myself.

I think it says a lot about the CouchDB community that they invited both Josh Berkus and Selena Deckelmann from Postgres to be speakers. The “NoSQL” space has become quite combative recently, so it is great to see that the CouchDB has connections to the Postgres community, and respect for the history and lessons that the Postgres folks have learned over the year. Josh’s talk on not reinventing the wheel was well received, and his discussion of Joins vs Mapreduce took me back to my days as a graduate student in databases. His talk made a great lead in for Selena’s talk on the nitty gritty details of MultiVersion Concurrency Control

There were lots of good discussions on issues related to security and CouchApps, but the discussion that got my attention the most was Max Ogden’s discussion on the work that he is doing to open up access to government data, particularly around the use of location information. He’s been using GeoCouch as the platform for this work. In the past I’ve written about the importance of a good platform for location apps, particularly in the context of GeoDjango. GeoCouch looks to be a very nice platform for location based applications. This is a very nice plus for the CouchDB community.

These days, it’s impossible to be at a conference that involves Javascript and not hear some buzz about Node.js. As expected, there was quite a bit of it, but it was interesting to talk to people about what they are doing with Node. Everything that I heard reinforces my gut feel that Node.js is going to be important.

I was one of the mentors for the CouchDB project when it came to the Apache Software Foundation, and I was asked to speak about community. The CouchDB community has accomplished a lot in the last few years, and is doing really well. I prepared a slide deck, but didn’t project it because my talk was the last talk of the conference, and we wanted to do it in the outside amphitheater. I also wanted to tune some of the sections of the talk to include things that I observed or was asked about during the conference. The biggest reason that I prepared slides was to show excerpts of Noah Slater’s CouchDB 1.0 retrospective e-mail. A lot of what I think about community is summarized well in Noah’s message, and the note summarizes the state of the community better than I could have done it myself. I hope that we’ll be hearing more testimonials like Noah’s in the years to come.

3 thoughts on “CouchCamp 2010

  1. Nitin Borwankar

    Ted,

    Thanks very much for your early contributions to making the Apache CouchDB project a reality. I have benefited greatly from CouchDB and we don’t see you often enough to thank you in person, so it was great to meet you at CouchCamp and hear the stories of the early days of the Apache CouchDB project.

  2. Robert Newson

    A great summary of all the cool stuff that happened at CouchCamp.

    Getting everyone together was a fantastic idea and I’m sure we’ll be doing it regularly.

    It really is a community, it’s not just a slogan.

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