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We’ve been building for this for three years, said Naveen Molloy, COO of Bitski, a startup company based in San Francisco that has suddenly found itself at the center of the NFT craze. While most of us were startled to find out that fungible is not a microorganism, and that an NFT can sell for $6.6 million, Bitski had been ready and waiting for the moment. They observed the popularity of digital assets years ago in the virtual world gaming industry. They saw the challenges presented by blockchain transactions. And they built a platform to process blockchain transactions faster. CockroachDB Engineer Nathan Stilwell interviewed Bitski’s CTO Patrick Tescher and COO Naveen Malloy to discuss NFT basics, Ethereum, and the NFT marketplace, as well as the challenges of processing blockchain transactions.

Dan Kelly

March 18, 2022

When you’ve got a great idea for a startup, application architecture is probably one of the last things on your mind. But architecting your app right the first time can save you major headaches further down the road. So let’s take a look at a typical startup application architecture, with a particular focus on the database and how the choices that application architects make in that part of their stack can impact scale, user experience, and more.

Charlie Custer

March 16, 2022

In my last blog post we looked at how we can deploy CockroachDB across multiple regions in Azure with the help of Cilium CNI. In this blog post we evolve this architecture to allow for the use of a mix of Kubernetes pods and virtual machines. Because CockroachDB is a single binary it makes it easy to deploy as a container or just run it natively on virtual machines. This type of architecture may be required for a number of reasons. As businesses consider their future cloud strategy and how they can move their existing applications workloads to the Public Cloud this type of hybrid architecture may be required. Perhaps the on-premises data centers do not have the capability to run a Kubernetes environment as this can be complex and requires additional infrastructure that may not be available. This is just one example but there are likely to be many. Now let’s take a closer look at the deployment details.

Imagine you’re driving a rental car in Rome and the satnav (or GPS) on your phone stops working. This happened to me two years ago when I was commuting by car each day from an Airbnb in Trastevere to an office on Via Amsterdam.

Michael Goddard

March 9, 2022

Do you love thinking about servers? Most developers don’t. That’s why serverless platforms such as AWS Lambda, which lets you run functions in the cloud without having to think about servers, have become so popular. Running your code in the cloud doesn’t truly free you from thinking about servers unless you’re also using a serverless database, though. Amazon itself offers a serverless database called Amazon Aurora Serverless, but what if you prefer the advantages that CockroachDB offers, or simply want to avoid vendor lock-in with your database in case you choose to migrate to a different cloud in the future?

Charlie Custer

March 8, 2022

When you’re hiring for startups, each search for a new teammate can feel like a make-or-break moment for the company’s success. With such great stakes, it’s all the more important to make facts-based, data-driven hiring decisions when interviewing new people. That’s why we’re huge fans of hiring rubrics at Cockroach Labs. Not only do they get us closer to hiring the right person for open roles, they also ensure we have a hiring process that reduces bias. Of course, this is easier said than done. The challenges to developing rubrics mirror their benefits: they require consensus on what it takes to bolster your team’s skills, culture, and diversity.

To help people get outdoors and improve their physical well-being, we’ll create an outdoor activity tracker. Although we won’t cover aspects such as user management, the app will have an input page where users can enter activities such as hiking, skating, swimming, and soccer, with details such as date, duration, distance, and a description. The application’s activities page will list activities from the database and let users sort by fields like date, distance, and duration.

“Do things that don’t scale.” That YCombinator mantra may be the single most common piece of advice given to early-stage tech startups. And with good reason – it’s great advice! But if you follow it, with a little luck you’ll reach a point where it no longer applies (at least on a technical level).

Charlie Custer

February 28, 2022

The concept of a database existed before there were computers. Some of you are even old enough to remember the filing cabinets in which your parents kept health records, tax documents, and old family recipes. The first computer database was built in the 1960s, but the history of databases as we know them, really begins in 1970.

Dan Kelly

February 24, 2022