 Yeah. So I am delighted to be here. This is, as Rich might have alluded to, this is my first Apache Con. I don't have the retro t-shirt to wear like Rich and Sam. But I picked mine up this morning, and I'll be happy to sport it in the future. I am really excited to talk to you today because, essentially, I've given an opportunity to talk about something that has consumed an untold number of hours over the past decade for me. And I'm excited to share some of our experiences in the CouchDB project because I think they are some of the events over the past 10 years, I think, are events that a lot of us in our various projects encounter. And I think the way the project responded to them, the way the project grew over time, is a testament to the support that the ASF provides. And I think it's just a fantastic journey. So yeah, this is about Apache CouchDB in large parts and the journey that we've had. So that journey begins almost 10 years ago now, which reflecting on this talk as I was preparing to give it was, I don't know, it made me feel old. That journey starts for all intents and purposes with a gentleman by the name of Damien Katz, who back in 2008 published a blog post that said, hey, I've accepted a new full-time position at IBM to work on CouchDB. And as a condition of that new position, I'm donating all the code to the Apache Software Foundation. Damien had previously had a project on Source4 to Google code or something like that, just kind of hacking away on it on his spare time. And actually more than his spare time, if you, he gave a fantastic talk at a Ruby fringe in 2009 and told CouchDB and me that talked about the investments that he had made at a personal level of seeing this project through. It really is, it's quite a talk, I'd encourage you to go see it. So this was the start of the journey. And I wasn't there at the time, but I'm told that in addition to his many hats that he wears at the ASF, Mr. Sam Ruby was also instrumental in bringing Damien back to IBM and creating a space for him to go work on CouchDB under the ages of the Apache Software Foundation. So we got that code in there. And we brought the project to the incubator over the course of the next several months. That project graduated. And the company that I had started had gotten interested in the project. We had started contributing through the course of 2008 and 2009. And at the end of 2009, we had launched a cloud service based largely on this code base. And I thought that was an important testament for the project because now we've got, you know, sort of skin in the game. We've got, well, we have sort of, of course, understand the Apache way and the sort of fact that every one of our committers is entering into the project on his or her own terms. It's also important to have, you know, folks who are really committed to the success of the project in the long term. And in 2010, we reached our 1.0 release. So in this initial phase of the project, kind of think like, okay, this is when things are a little easy. We're creating technical debt, not burning it down, right? We are, you know, the code is fun. It's easy to write. It's exciting. There's a lot of velocity. New contributors are coming in. You know, media wants to talk about it. Like, life is good. Life is fun. Except for, you know, when that 1.0 release came out, there was, you know, we had, we had a little sort of data loss bug in there that, you know, yours truly was responsible for. So we had a 24 by seven sort of coding session to go and mitigate it and release 1.0.1 a week later. Track down every single one who might have been affected and worked it through with them. But this was exciting. This was good. And then after 1.0, you know, we were trying to figure out, okay, how does the project go forward? And then this happened. My colleagues in the Couch TV project, you know, in the Couch One company, merged with a company called Membase that was providing Memcache D support and they announced themselves as Couchbase, right? Database has just gotten more awesome. We said, okay, in the community, we said, like, all right, what does this mean for Couch DB, both on a technical level, like we're looking at the Memcache D code and trying to sort of fit that square peg into that round hole and figure out how the architectures might align. And, you know, this was kind of sprung on us. We weren't quite sure what to do with it. And on a sort of political level too, on an organizational level, what is this gonna mean? This is a big event, right? And everybody said, okay, we're gonna make it work. We're gonna figure out what makes sense. The project's gonna kind of, you know, we'll keep on going. This will be fine. We started to make friends with Shane and the folks in brand and trademarks and whatnot in the Apache Software Foundation. I'm sure they got tired of hearing Couch DB versus Couchbase branding questions and trademark questions over time. We made our way through 2011 kind of bumping along and then we got this sort of New Year's Day present from Damien. And I'm not gonna lie, that was a kind of a punch to the guy, right? We had poured a lot of energy at this point. My company was three years in the making running a cloud service that really critically depended upon the success of Couch DB. And here is the original project's founder coming in and saying, this whole Couch DB thing, it was great, it was fun while it lasted. You all should come to Couchbase now, right? Didn't feel good. So we had sort of dueling blog posts in Twitter wars and stuff for a while. And yeah, I mean, it kind of was, it was a little tough for a little while there. But this is where I think the ASF really demonstrated the power that it does have and the staying power, right? The installation of the Apache way in the committers and the sort of us being able to fall back on the position that, hey, we all really are equal contributors to this project. And one of the reasons we brought this to Apache in the first place was so that if the otherwise BDFL should decide that for life had a different interpretation that the project could move forward, the project could survive. So we took encouragement in that. And this was also a time where I think some of us recognized that our role as members of the PMC needed to evolve. Originally the PMC was sort of the Uber hackers, right? The ones who fundamentally were the ones you trusted to modify the B-tree if it needed to be modified. But as time moved on, we recognized that we needed to play a different role. We needed to be the ones who were fostering more of a community. We needed to be the ones who were encouraging more contributions from a broader, more diverse group of people if the project was going to be able to thrive long term. That was a big, so I think fundamental recognition that we sort of had this internal discussion and said, hey, we're kind of doing it wrong here. We used to think about a commit bit as something that was, boy, can we trust that this person's gonna be around for the long term? Are we really ready to kind of bring them into the fold? And that was the wrong way to think about it. When we instead said, no, the commit bit is just us placing our trust in this person to help set the direction for the project, we started to give them out more frequently, give them out in a more sort of broad setting, not just people who were hacking on the core code, but people who were writing documentation. Sure, that's a commit bit. And that, I think, was really powerful. You started to see the committers grow and you started to see people who might've been on the edge about whether they wanted to be engaged in the project. That commit bit was, hey, that was the thing, that was the encouragement that they needed to become more full-fledged contributors. Another thing that happened in this sort of roller coaster period throughout 2012 and 2013, we started thinking more assertively about what it meant to be a member of the community. We drafted a code of conduct and put that through its revisions, had it edited on behalf of the community and published that for the CouchDV project. And my understanding is that was subsequently adopted in large form by the foundation as a whole. And so I'm really happy to see that. So that was a real maturation time for the project. There wasn't all that much happening in the code base at this point in time. We were adding small features and fixing bugs and sort of point releases were starting to get a little further apart. But we had new foundations for a more scalable community going forward. And that's when we started to say, okay, I think we've got a community in place where we can really kickstart new activity and a new release in the project, right? And then my company got acquired. And it was another round of sort of, ooh, what does this mean for the project? What does this mean for the company? And I mean, I certainly had these discussions with IBM as we were going through the due diligence about what the future of our contributions to the Apache project was going to be. And I was assured by my sort of counterparts that no, no, no, it'll be good. We're wholly supportive of the ASF. Look, we've been in there since the beginning. We contribute to all kinds of projects. You should feel rest assured that we want you to contribute just as much as you have been. I said, okay, still there's a lot of consternation about what this is gonna mean joining this massive corporation. But sure enough, I mean, I have to tip my hat to IBM. I think that if anything, our pace of contributions accelerated. We didn't feel as much of a need to sort of have a big existential discussion about each contribution and say, well, is this too much? Are we holding back things that we need to hold back? It really became a very authentic, like bring it into Apache. Our value is the cloud platform, right? We can go and authentically contribute just about everything that we do into the Apache project. And since then, I think things have been on the upswing. I'm very happy that my colleagues, my friends over at the neighborhood are now formalizing the work they've been doing for the project and they are doing fantastic things in the offline first movement and are, I think, people I still look to as sort of truly leaders in what it means to foster an active, diverse, independent community. And together, we spent the better part of last year in a very sort of significant, almost herculean effort, I think sometimes, to get the 2.0 release out the door. This represented almost five years' worth of development at this point and lots of new functionality, new branding, new messaging, new documentation, new UIs. I mean, this is not how a 2.0 release is supposed to happen, but it happened, it's out the door now and the project, I think, is on a great and healthy trajectory and I'm really, really happy about it. So let's recap. We had the departure of a project's founder. We had a company sponsoring the majority of the committers getting acquired and just for good measure, we had more than five years in between major releases. Any one of these things could be fatal, I think, for a typical open source project and I really do think it's a testament to the Apache Software Foundation and the support that's been provided that we are here and we're stronger than ever. So I'm excited about that. And IBM is too and it's one of the reasons that, certainly in addition to CouchDB, we bring lots of projects and lots of contributions to the Apache Software Foundation. Ones that are already here and new ones like our OpenWISC functions as a service project or this was basically a research effort incubated within IBM and we said, well, if this is gonna be successful as an open source project, we need to bring it to a community. We need it to have its own sort of legs independent of our own R&D. And of course, our contributions to things like Apache Spark and the broader big data stack will be established to Spark Technology Center for people to contribute directly to the project and service of things like my Watson data platform and many, many more in the big data stack and outside. Apache has become really an ideal destination for a lot of our efforts. And I feel for Sam and the board in managing the velocity of new podlings that are coming in and I know that we're responsible for a non-trivial chunk of that. So with that, I hope you've enjoyed this sort of journey through one project's experience and maturation within the Apache Software Foundation. I hope you all have an awesome conference and I'm really excited to spend the time with you. Thank you.