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Do you enjoy weird and strange build issues? Or do you think something we do in this blog post is fishy and you want to fix it? Want us to use bazel instead? Good news - we’ve got a role for you! We’re on the lookout for more engineers on our Developer Infrastructure team! We’re looking to expand our sprawling development infrastructure as we grow to more people and a bigger codebase with new and exciting functionality and cloud management. If you want to help the engineers write the exciting next generation of databases by empowering their work environment, don’t delay - apply today!

We are excited to share that Fundamentals of CockroachDB for Java Developers is now available on Cockroach University. This course is designed for Java application developers who are looking to advance their education with CockroachDB and build scalable, resilient applications and services. This is our third course offering following the inaugural Getting Started course and Fundamentals of CockroachDB for Python Developers. Similar to the Python course, you will build a full-stack-ride sharing application, but in Java using Spring Boot with Spring Data JPA.

When building out our internship program at Cockroach Labs, we wanted to be intentional about how we would support up-and-coming developers, bring in fresh ideas, and create a funnel of amazing new grads to Cockroach Labs. It’s been five years since we hosted our first interns at our headquarters in New York. As the company has grown, so has our engineering internship program. Our general philosophy around interns may be different from other technology companies: we assign real work that applies to the next releases of CockroachDB and CockroachDB Dedicated. Our interns understand that their work affects our company’s roadmap, gain a sense of what working at Cockroach is like, and build relationships with engineers on their team and leadership members.

Driven by a new breed of fintech applications, financial services organizations look to the cloud for infrastructure that is always-on, resilient, and able to support the real-time processing of transactions. In this post, we investigate how these organizations can deliver peak performance while ensuring compliance with local data protection and privacy laws. As Facebook and Google, and new-age fintech apps like Betterment and Robinhood, have driven consumers to expect feature-rich applications, every business needs to be concerned with performance. While this remains a top priority for financial services organizations, another component unique to the banking industry needs to be top of mind – keeping latency low. Another significant benefit of cloud-native applications for banks is that they can support very high volumes of transactions with low latency.

Jessica Edwards

March 26, 2021

Imagine you show up at your favorite cafe and its credit card terminal is down. What happens? Most likely, you don’t have any cash on you. Instead, you go to the next cafe and order from them instead. We never want this to happen to one of our customers, so that’s why we chose to build our infrastructure on CockroachDB. At Aurora Payments, we make sure that small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) get paid quickly and with low fees. We integrate with their point of sale (POS) technology and business management software. We learn all the nuances of their business so that we can process and deliver payments exactly the way our customers need them. We know that all of our effort to deliver exceptional payment solutions would be meaningless if we didn’t have a database that is always on - and always available.

During my first week at Cockroach Labs, our company held its annual Roacherness Awards, a ceremony to recognize and celebrate Roachers who embody our values. I was pleasantly surprised when my colleague Chelsea received an award for our value ‘Establishing Balance,’ celebrating the boundaries she sets between her work and home life through using benefits like our flexible Paid Time off policy to explore the world. This being my second job out of college, I was shocked. My experience post-college was one in which companies asked me to dive into my work with cult-like abandon, to define myself by the goals of the company first, and to let who I am come second.

The current mentorship model is broken. It requires you to have the privilege of belonging to an established network (like a renowned university) or ‘cold call’ potential mentors on a platform like LinkedIn. Even after you find a mentor, it’s difficult to sustain a mentor-mentee connection. This is the challenge a group of students from Lassonde School of Engineering at York University set out to resolve through their Hack the North 2020++ app: mntr.tech

Amruta Ranade

March 19, 2021

Seven years ago, Spencer Kimball made the first commit to the CockroachDB — an open source project he had started with Ben Darnell and Peter Mattis:  Over the years, the project grew in popularity and so did the number of contributors. In 2015, Spencer, Ben, and Peter cofounded a for-profit company around the project — Cockroach Labs. As a for-profit business, we consider it our responsibility to financially support the open source developers and maintainers who help us build a healthy ecosystem of tools and libraries that work with CockroachDB. Cockroach Labs proudly sponsors the following maintainers who help us make CockroachDB the most evolved database on the planet (presented in reverse alphabetical order to liven things up).

Amruta Ranade

March 18, 2021

Many databases -- including Amazon Aurora and CockroachDB -- claim to be "global." While there is no official definition of the term "global database", it deserves to be unpacked. For those who prefer to watch or listen, we explore Aurora's architecture in depth during this webinar: "CockroachDB vs Amazon Aurora: Battle of the Cloud Databases". ### What is a global database? A global database promises global capabilities. At a bare minimum, it should satisfy these three requirements:

Jim Walker

March 17, 2021