I miss Couchbase terribly, but I’m also glad to be done and start a new chapter in my career. The thing I miss most are the great people there, super bright hard working folks who amazed me on a daily basis. Which, ironically, was the thing that made it easy to leave. Seeing the different teams taking the ball and running with it without me leading the charge. Things at Couchbase grew and matured so fast I started to realize I couldn’t keep up without spending way more time working. I was no longer the catalyst that moved things forward, I was becoming the bottleneck preventing engineers from maturing and leaders from rising.
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And now what’s next? Well, beginning in January 2014 I’ll be starting at salesforce.com and working closely with Pat Helland on a project that eventually will underpin huge amounts of their site infrastructure, improving performance, reliability and predictability, while reducing production costs dramatically.
Best of luck Damien. I remember sitting in Orlando talking with you and Julian Robichaux about CouchDb back in 2005/2006. You can do anything.
Bruce Elgort 