Left MySQL/Joined CouchOne

For many people this will be old news, but I guess It thought I should put up something official.

At the end of September, I left MySQL/Sun/Oracle – that wasn’t an easy decision, mostly because I loved my job. It’s difficult to stop doing something that you enjoy so thoroughly and, over the years, have been so involved in. I did more than just get involved in the docs, I helped out with advice for different departments, worked on areas like DTrace, and of course helped write the documentation and enhanced many of the tools that enabled us to build such brilliant documentation. I managed to work with some amazing people, most of all the rest of my team who worked so hard to produce the manuals and content.

The impetus to leave came from an opportunity to work with another excellent team on a different database, namely CouchDB. CouchDB reminds me of my early database work working on freeform text databases, with a nice open and easy structure, but with ways of getting standardized information out.

I’ve joined CouchOne as Vice President of Documentation. The core of that is building an entirely new suite of documentation, starting from the ground up with everything from the build environment for the docs, to the content itself. Longer term there are lots of other things we are working on, but it will hang off that core reference documentation.