Damian Katz - Why he decided to create couchDB

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!

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)

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

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

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?