Cloudant

Today marks the one year anniversary of Joe Williams (@williamsjoe) becoming a member of Team Cloudant.  Those of us who are married will recall that one year is the paper anniversary so it's fitting that Joe will be receiving paper (in the form of vested stock options) from Cloudant today.  I thought I would take a moment on this occasion to thank Joe for his work over the past year.

We first hired Joe on a contract basis to help us build an internal infrastructure tool we call The Deployer.  This is the tool that allows us to quickly provision and configure resources from a number of different cloud providers.  We can, with the push of one button, 'inflate' an X-node Cloudant database cluster, and have it configured and available in a matter of minutes, all because of Joe's ongoing efforts.

Since joining full-time, Joe has acted as our 'utility infielder.'  All the problems in the operations and infrastructure realm fell to Joe.  He built and mantains our monitoring system, our logging system, and our build system.  That alarm system we have where we get a text message in the middle of the night when something goes wrong, Joe did that (thanks Joe!).  Joe, margarita in hand, has pushed hot code updates to live systems from a Mexican karaoke bar.

Needless to say Joe has been and continues to be a staggering presence at Cloudant.  We feel privileged to work with him on a daily basis.  I only hope I'm able to write a similar post on his 5 year anniversary.  Plus, the man has excellent mutton chops.

Thanks Joe!  Here's to the big things (and fewer alarms) coming in the next year.