CouchDB Weekly Meeting (see summary)

• CouchDB 2.0 status: work is making progress. Help with a Windows version is much appreciated.
  Also, the _config endpoint for cluster interface still needs to be figured out. Potentially using a database for config values. Discussion (summary below, continues on on dev@.)
  And: Currently compaction works only on the backdoor ports, which isn’t feasible and the workflow should also prevent users from triggering a clusterwide compaction. First step is a list of all incompatibilities in the docs. A proper solution for the compact view feature is more likely for 2.1.
• Fauxton: Can detect if running on a backdoor port now. Also, the conversion of the front page from backbone.js to react.js got merged in!
• Marketing: Get in touch with companies/organisations that use CouchDB to promote authentic user voices e.g. on YouTube or as testimonials or authorised quotes.
• Meeting time: The IRC meeting shall be held an hour earlier – 18:00 UTC.
• Other business: Redesign of the ‘contribute’-section on the CouchDB website progresses (summary of discussion below).

Major Discussions

CouchDB Articles Pills and Tutorials Ideas (ongoing, see thread) & How do CouchApps fit into the CouchDB story? (ongoing, see thread)

The discussion on Marketing-ML around the future of CouchApps and its place with CouchDB continued and subdivided into multiple threads, while the main points of discussion remained:

• how to fix the identity of CouchApps (design, naming etc.)
• within context of the CouchDB story of “Data where you need it.”
• and the CouchDB core features

The common goal of this discussion is agreed on to be finding a way to strengthen the overall CouchDB story for its greater good and to find a reasonable way to further handle the functionalities of what are CouchApps today, so that they no longer lead to confusion in the perception of what CouchDB is about. Especially renaming (or potentially take the name “Couch” from CouchApps) is being discussed as a crucial step to mark a clear distinction, e.g. in the follow-up thread.

Two names: CouchDB & Couch APP Server (see thread)

A user suggested to “focus on marketing two concepts named ‘CouchDB’ and ‘Couch App Server’.” as “a middle ground between the two extremes of ‘R.I.P. CouchApps’ and ‘CouchApps are CouchDB’s greatest feature!’”

The future of couchapp (ongoing, see thread)

Another follow-up thread on the User- and Marketing-ML. Some users describe their personal story of getting to know CouchDB and what they have learned about the role and use of CouchApps. Discussion will continue on the Marketing-ML.

Configuration in CouchDB 2.0 (ongoing, see thread)

In the Fauxton team that is using CouchDB 2.0, it has been discussed to remove the config tap or how to achieve a better way to make configuration work on cluster-wide interfaces and prevent the unwitting use of config on backdoor ports. Config changes and other solutions are being discussed for 2.0.

CouchDB website: contributing redesign / text help (see thread)

It was proposed to introduce a clear overview, visually presented as cards, of the various subprojects and what is required to be able to contribute on them. Some contributors teamed up to compose crisp onboarding text for this overview, to help address the right users for the respective projects.

Releases in the CouchDB Universe

• couchdb-view-tester 2.0.0 – Your friendly helper to quickly iterate on CouchDB views
• couchdb-ddoc-test 1.0.0 – CouchDB Design Doc Testing Tool
• couchdb-fixture 0.1.1 – Initialize a CouchDB database with fixtures meant for use with mocha
• couch-promised 1.0.1 – A promise-based wrapper around CouchDB. CouchPromised does not aim to be a full- featured CouchDB client and instead aims to provide a minimal set of methods for some of the most common interactions
• couchdb-purge 1.0.2 – Purge CouchDB documents
• fauxton 1.0.2 – Fauxton is a modular CouchDB dashboard and Futon replacement
• hapi-auth-couchdb-cookie 3.0.0 – CouchDB Cookie authentication plugin

Opinions and other News in the CouchDB Universe

• Documentation: CouchDB Best Practices by eHealthAfrica.org
• Article: Why Developer Experience Matters by @Cloudant @CloudExpo – “In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Bradley Holt, Developer Advocate for IBM Cloudant, will outline his views on the three key components of a great developer experience: self-service, composability and hackability.”
• PouchDB support for React Native is coming along nicely. Storage works using AsyncStorage via asyncstorage-down; the only remaining blocker is XHR bugs.
• Big fix for a memory leak in retry replication came in for PouchDB.
• PouchDB does Chaos Monkey-style testing.
• Embrace the extensive list of PouchDB plugins.

Use Cases, Questions and Answers

Use Cases:

• Talk: Eugenio Marletti from Clue App – “Holy Sync: A sane approach to offline-first cross-platform data syncing” on base of CouchDB, with the example of the mobile period tracker Clue. “The logo is a lazy person – so it looks like a perfect fit” 😀 (Droidcon Turino/April 10, 2015)
• Talk: Daniel Zen on 4-way/Offline Data Binding in AngularJS (ng Vegas Conf/May 8, 2015)
• Blog Post: Configuring CouchDB on Azure
• Blog Post: Connecting to Couchbase with PouchDB, from BlackBerry DevBlog
• Spawning multiple CouchDB actions at-once with Transactions or Trigger Chains
• Concurrent CouchDB Triggers

Stack Overflow:

• Reading multiple attributes in CouchDB with Java
• CORS error in PouchDB with CORS enabled in CouchDB
• CouchDB sort result array by date if date is stored in an array of integers?
• How to use Javascript to get data from CouchDB in case of a map view?
• How to do cookie authentication on CouchDB with AngularJS

no public answer yet:

Stack Overflow:

• CouchDB basic authentiation using stdhttpclient
• Couchdb-python: How can I call functions in map_reduce function?
• CouchDB: Permission of databases moved from remote machines

For more new questions and answers about CouchDB, see these search results.

Get involved!

If you want to get into working on CouchDB:

• We have an infinite number of open contributor positions on CouchDB. Submit a pull request and join the project!
• CouchDB has a new wiki. Help us move content from the old to the new one!
• Can you help with Web Design, Development or UX for our Admin Console? No Erlang skills required! – Get in touch with us.
• Do you want to help moving the CouchDB docs translation forward? We’d love to have you in our L10n team! See our current status and languages we’d like to provide CouchDB docs in on this page. If you’d like to help, don’t hesitate to contact the L10n mailing list on l10n@couchdb.apache.org or ping Andy Wenk (awenkhh on IRC).

We’d be happy to have you on board!

Events

• May 14, Brisbane, Australia: Brisbane NoSQL Group
• May 19, New York, US: SQLNYC Meetup

Job opportunities for people with CouchDB skills

• Backend Web Developer JAVA (m/w) (CouchDB exp. ‘nice to have’), Munich, Germany
• Senior Systems Administrator (CouchDB exp. ‘desirable’), Exeter, UK

Time to relax!

• Web Annotation Is Already A Scale. Three takeaways from I Aonntate 2015 – “I was particularly struck by one group’s concept of a configurable ‘filter’ that could help make sense of the many annotations across the web, bringing value to different groups of people. It’s an exciting time to build standards and interoperability so annotations can communicate with each other.”
• The importance of being uncomfortable. – “We all know that it’s important to be honest with each other. It’s one of the first things we learn as children, right up there with “share” and “play nice.” But honesty is hard. We spend a lot of time trying not to be uncomfortable.”
• The Recompiler: An Interview with Audrey Eschright – “Audrey’s newest project is The Recompiler, a feminist hacker magazine that will be launching in summer of 2015. Given Audrey’s successful track record, The Recompiler promises bring something wonderful and valuable to the lives of many technically-minded people.”
• The Pipeline Isn’t The Problem: Dissecting The Real Gender Bias in Tech Positions – “Talented women like Seka face additional obstacles to being a woman in tech—feeling even more insecure and unsupported for not being ‘techie’ enough.”

… and also in the news

• “FACT: most “big data” is actually two small datas standing on each other shoulders wearing a trenchcoat and sunglasses.” (@mhoye via twitter)
• The new Muppet Show trailer
• snowden – 3D mesh of Snowden’s Bust “npm install…”