Inspiring talk on programming by creator of CouchDB
infoq.com
infoq.com
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"