Month: April 2020

Dear Datastax

Dear Datastax,

I couldn’t leave without writing you a note to thank you and reminisce a bit about the good times we shared together. The last two years have been intense, memorable, and exciting. Working with you has been a wonderful experience.

It seems so long ago when I showed up in Austin for my first week on the job with a handful of people on the new cloud team. You were so supportive and everyone was so nice and welcoming. I don’t think that office exists any longer and I can no longer count the cloud team members on my fingers. We both have changed a lot since then–I know I’m certainly better because of my time with you. Of course there are the cool technologies that we played with that can now season my resume, but there is also what we built together, how we built it together, and most importantly, there are the people with whom we did all the awesome things.

We spent an awful lot of time together, but I appreciate that you supported me spending time with my family. Most days I’d check in with you around 7:30am and didn’t wish you goodnight until 10:45pm. Even though we worked a lot, I was able to walk my daughter to school every school day. I was able to attend all the parent/teacher conferences for my kids. I never had to miss a band concert, play, camp out, choir concert, piano recital, or graduation. I was able to take care of sick family members. Every evening I could sit down to dinner with my family. Thank you for never judging me poorly for trying to be a good husband and father.

I have so many happy memories with you. Learning new things. Passionate discussions trying to get to the best solution. Kosher BBQ in Chicago. Live demos where the demo-gods smiled and things did not crash and burn. Dinner under the space shuttle. The satisfaction we shared seeing our code start to come together and work. However, some of my fondest memories are when things didn’t work and we would swarm with the team in a web meeting to complain, laugh, and work on a solution with people dropping to eat dinner or put kids to bed and then popping back in to bang against the problem until we figured it out at 1, 2, 3am.

Do you remember last May during the last few days before Accelerate? What a flurry of activity! Then the training session started. We crossed our fingers, held our breaths, watched, and waited to see if what we built would be able to handle everything thrown at it. Everything worked–we did a great job there.

How about the week leading up to the release of Astra? That was some crazy fun chaos as we scrambled to get last minute tweaks, fixes, and changes (such as renaming Apollo to Astra) deployed and tested. I was exhausted as we finally made the switchover changes to put Astra out there so that anyone could plug in a credit card and get a running Cassandra database a minute later. We did some more testing to make sure everything was working correctly and then I went to bed reveling in our accomplishment. I slept like the dead.

Now that it is time for me to try something else I’m certainly going to miss you, but I’m also so proud of what we were able to do together. With friends and colleagues we built Astra. We created a product that I (as a developer) want to use. I am using it. I will continue to use it. I hope Astra will continue to grow and become a huge success. I hope you will remember me as fondly as I remember you.

Cheers,

Nathan
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanbak/
http://www.nathanbak.com/

A Database I Want to Use

If you’re only interested in connecting your ESP8266 to a database, skip to the bottom paragraph. If you’re not interested in databases, read the whole thing.

I am not interested in databases. As a software developer, I understand the value of a good database and I like using databases to store/retrieve/search/etc. data. The part I don’t like is the setting up, configuring, optimizing, scaling, maintaining, and other tasks required to keep a database up-and-running. I want to spend my time writing code rather than babysitting a database. I want to use a database, not run a database.

Nearly four years ago when playing with my then new ESP8266 I needed a database and I ended up going with REDIS and WEBDIS because it was the lowest bar to entry that I could find for my requirements. It has worked well-enough for my needs, but nothing to rave about. I’ve spent the past two years making something exponentially better.

In 2018 I joined Datastax which is the most important company behind the NoSQL database Apache Cassandra. Cassandra was not a database that I wanted to use. While the performance, scalability and reliability of Cassandra are unsurpassed, the complexity to get Cassandra ready to go and keep it running was a deal breaker for someone like me that isn’t interested in being a DB admin.

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Datastax Cloud Team I had various responsibilities, but my personal goal was to create a database I wanted to use. The team succeeded with Datastax Astra which is a “Cloud-native Database-as-a-Service built on Apache Cassandra”. That means I can just go to a website, fill in a few details, click a button, and seconds later I have a database I can use. It’s awesome.

My day job was working to make Datastax Astra a database I wanted to use and finally I am able to spend my weekends using it. I created an Arduino library called astra_esp8266 which makes it easy for an ESP8266 to communicate with a database. The source code is available on github but most users will probably just want to install the library into an Arduino IDE. After four years, with two of those years taking thousands of hours of my time, there is now a database that I want to use.