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Damien Katz
Personal blog · damienkatz.netprogrammingdata
Damien Katz's personal blog at damienkatz.net covers programming and data. Since 2007, 71 different Hacker News readers have linked it 100 times, most often “What Sucks About Erlang (2008)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Most-linked posts?
- What Sucks About Erlang (2008)10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2008-03-09
- Damien Katz: Lotus Notes Formula Engine Rewrite7 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2007-12-03
- Notes on Building Noise: A JSON Search Engine Written in Rust5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-05-24
- How not to Pitch To Y Combinator (2006)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2008-04-22
- The Future of CouchDB3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-01-05
- Damien Katz: New Gig 3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2008-01-02
- Dynamo Systems Work Too Hard2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-05-03
- Error Codes or Exceptions? Why is Reliable Software So Hard?2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-03-02
- Damien Katz is starting to get pissed at Erlang2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2007-12-11
- Tank Man2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-10-11
What Hacker News says?
These are attributes that everyone can, on honest personal judgement, can mistake to possessing themselves to varying degrees. But it might be a useful list to read through when stuck at a problem that is simply not giving way. Unless we have the chance to learn from and be coached directly by a master, what would be helpful is narratives on how they think and solve problems. The best I have so far come across in a…
Comment linking /2005/01/formula-engine-rewrite.html
on “Mastering Programming: An Outline”Submitted The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C as a story · 431 points
HN discussionI use the comma-first style in everything (in languages that have this problem) now that I know about it. I was also interested to see it with semicolons in Simon PJ's chapter in Beautiful Code. I just wish the character was something other than a comma! It looks so wrong in that position. BTW, your second example should be var variable , anotherVariable // preceding comma , thirdVariable ; Perl and Python don't hav…
Comment linking /2008/03/what_sucks_abou.html
on “Node.js Guide”Submitted The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C (2013) as a story · 285 points
HN discussionIt works! (n=1) "I used to go to the gym and pretend in my head I had already died, and it was 100 years into the future, and I was dreaming of some guy who wrote a database. I didn't know how the story ended yet, I hadn't gotten that far." -- Damien Katz, http://damienkatz.net/2014/10/tank_man.html
Comment linking /2014/10/tank_man.html
on “My Resume Is Total Fiction”Submitted The Future of CouchDB as a story · 247 points
HN discussionCounterexample: Damian Katz and how he did a rewrite on the Lotus compute engine[1]. I guess it depends. For 30k lines of code it should be possible for any good engineer. A browser is of course in another ballpark, but if you have a really good core team it should still be manageable. It also depends on whether you're willing to break things (Apple with OSX). [1] http://damienkatz.net/2005/01/formula-engine-rewrite…
Comment linking /2005/01/formula-engine-rewrite.html
on “Servo: Inside Mozilla's mission to reinvent the web browser”Submitted Follow up to "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C" as a story · 201 points
HN discussionDynamo is not exactly a performant or efficient model. It's the equivalent of pulling all the distributed systems guts out and handing them to the user to deal with. And the resulting toll is quantifiable: http://damienkatz.net/2013/05/dynamo_sure_works_hard.html
Comment linking /2013/05/dynamo_sure_works_hard.html
on “Riak and the demise of Basho”Submitted What Sucks About Erlang (2008) as a story · 145 points
HN discussionI write it fully acknowledging that programming language flamewars are pointless, but this article just shows that you don't even have to try hard to create a biased comparison. Here's the essential difference between Go and Erlang: Go gets most of the things right, Erlang gets way too much wrong. So what does Go gets right but Erlang doesn't: * Go is fast. Erlang isn't * Go has a non-surprising, mainstream syntax.…
Comment linking /2008/03/what_sucks_abou.html
on “Some thoughts on Go and Erlang”Submitted How not to Pitch To Y Combinator (2006) as a story · 112 points
HN discussionI write Erlang every day and love it, but I have to agree with most of the points raised by http://damienkatz.net/2008/03/what_sucks_abou.html
Comment linking /2008/03/what_sucks_abou.html
on “Functional Programming Is Hard, That's Why It's Good”Submitted Getting Your Open Source Project to 1.0 as a story · 97 points
HN discussionSorta related: http://damienkatz.net/2013/01/the_unreasonable_effectiveness...
Comment linking /2013/01/the_unreasonable_effectiveness_of_c.html
on “Best aspects of C”Submitted Error Codes or Exceptions? Why is Reliable Software So Hard? as a story · 84 points
HN discussionDamien Katz was rejected: http://damienkatz.net/2006/11/how_not_to_pitc.html Whether that counts for Couchbase is another question. (I guess it probably does)
Comment linking /2006/11/how_not_to_pitc.html
on “Ask HN: Which successful startups were rejected by YC?”Submitted Dynamo Systems Work Too Hard as a story · 78 points
HN discussionIt's a 10 year old blog post from the creator of CouchDB who then later declared the project dead despite it already having a vibrant open source community with multiple users and contributors. Then went on to create another project that had a similar name but was a merge of a bunch of other technologies which lead to endless confusion years on after the fact. http://damienkatz.net/2012/01/the_future_of_couchdb.html…
Comment linking /2012/01/the_future_of_couchdb.html
on “What Sucks About Erlang (2008)”Submitted REST, I just don't get it as a story · 74 points
HN discussion> It is funny this kind of came full circle. Damien Katz, the original CouchDB author was working on Lotus Notes as some point in his life. After many years, his "creation" comes back to IBM. There is some irony in there I think. Actually there is one more step. At some point IBM backed Damien's development of CouchDB: http://damienkatz.net/2008/01/faq_about_couch.html
Comment linking /2008/01/faq_about_couch.html
on “IBM to Acquire Cloudant”Submitted CouchDB is now officially Apache CouchDB as a story · 56 points
HN discussionIt is funny this kind of came full circle. Damien Katz, the original CouchDB author was working on Lotus Notes as some point in his life It's definitely interesting. I can remember people in the Notes community wondering why IBM didn't either take CouchDB and use it as a new Notes backend, or alternatively push the existing Notes bits as a mature document-based database. The end quote from Katz's "Formula Engine Rew…
Comment linking /2005/01/formula-engine-rewrite.html
on “IBM to Acquire Cloudant”Submitted Damien Katz: What Sucks About Erlang as a story · 52 points
HN discussionThey did. It is said on this very blog: http://damienkatz.net/2009/12/relaxed_inc.html : I, Jan, and Chris are building a startup around Apache CouchDB and Redpoint Ventures has invested $2 million. Pretty cool huh?
Comment linking /2009/12/relaxed_inc.html
on “How not to Pitch To Y Combinator (2006)”Submitted Realtime Chat on CouchDB as a story · 49 points
HN discussionPerhaps you are thinking of when Damien Katz (the original author of CouchDB) left the CouchDB project for CouchBase [1] (from which he has also since moved on [2])? [1] http://damienkatz.net/2012/01/the_future_of_couchdb.html [2] http://damienkatz.net/2013/09/human_after_all.html
Comment linking /2013/09/human_after_all.html
on “The Road to CouchDB 2.0”Submitted Damien Katz: CouchDB in the Browser as a story · 43 points
HN discussionJust to remind some people: - Damien Katz (creator of CouchDB) was also rejected[1]. He went on and got $2 million from Redpoint Ventures [2] - On this video[3], Jessica Livingston interviews Drew. It shows that he was also rejected the first time he tried out YC. - The oscar of rejected but finally accepted: I got into YC after applying six times [4] - Peteris Krumins also got rejected with his browserling idea, go…
Comment linking /2009/12/relaxed_inc.html
on “If all Rejection Letters could be so nice...”Submitted Thoughts on an Open Source Company as a story · 40 points
HN discussion
