It’s a huge day here Cloudant HQ; we are very excited to announce the two newest additions to our team: Bob Newson and Tim Anglade.

Tim Anglade certainly needs no introduction, at least in the world of NOSQL. I first met Tim here in Boston back in early 2009 when he gave the keynote at the “NOSQL Live” conference we cosponsored with 10Gen. Since that time, Tim has been a tireless promoter, interlocutor, and sometimes skeptic of all things NOSQL. This past year, he organized the NOSQL Summer reading group that had participation from more than 35 cities in 20 countries around the world. Since then he has been globetrotting on his “NOSQL World Tour,” organizing and promoting events large and small, and working on the NoSQL Tapes, a series of conversations with domain experts, thought-leaders, trailblazers, and Cloudant founders. Tim will be moving from his home country of France to join us here at Cloudant HQ in Boston (in January! buy a thick parka Tim.) Tim will be taking on various challenges at Cloudant including developer advocacy, community development, customer outreach and support, technical writing, and directing our social media efforts. We’re basically piling onto Tim all the stuff that we have never been able to do well. This means that the blog you’re reading is about to become much more exciting and useful. Please join us in welcoming Tim by directing all your questions and complaints to tim@cloudant.com. You should also follow him on Twitter: @timanglade.

Many of you already know Bob Newson from his prolific work with CouchDB. Bob has been a contributor on the project since 2008. Among his countless contributions to that project is the CouchDB-lucene extension, which provides full-text indexing capabilities. Bob is an expert in distributed systems, big data processing, and erlang. His official title at Cloudant will be ‘Senior Database Engineer,’ but unofficially we’re already referring to him as the resident ‘super-hard-problem solver’. He’ll be putting his software expertise to good use building new features for Cloudant and BigCouch, and streamlining our systems to make them faster, stronger, and more reliable. For now, Bob will continue to live and work from Windsor in his native land of England (God Save The Queen!) which is nice, because he’ll be able to provide early morning support while those of us in The States are still sleeping soundly. In his free time, Bob enjoys reading about Paxos and drinks with sparklers in them. Welcome to the team Bob! We couldn’t be more excited to have you on board.

P.S. – The pop-culture nerd in me would be remiss if I didn’t point out that both Bob Dionne and Bob Newson are now working with Cloudant. This means that I now have the chance to make endless Office Space allusions (“I have a meeting with The Bobs,” “Hey Bob! Bob!” etc.) which brings me no end of joy. It also gives me an excuse to put this picture up and have a good laugh.

“What would you say, you do here?”