Spencer Kimball
Co-founder & CEOSpencer Kimball is the CEO of Cockroach Labs, where he leads the development of scalable and resilient database solutions. Prior to this, he was an engineer at Square, contributing to their payment platform, and served as CTO at Viewfinder, overseeing social photo-sharing applications. He also spent nearly a decade at Google as a Staff Software Engineer, working on projects like the Google Servlet Engine and Colossus, Google’s distributed file storage system. Earlier in his career, Spencer co-founded WeGo Systems, where he led technology development. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Community
Creating a digestible GitHub digest
If you’ve ever “watched” a busy GitHub repository, your email inbox has discovered what it feels like to step in front of a firehose. If the project in question has active code reviewers, the problem is often worse by an order of magnitude. Every comment yields another email to all watchers. The CockroachDB repository’s weekly average is at 81 pull requests and 440 notification-generating comments. Most of us who once paid close attention to incoming changes have since lost the ability to do so; these days, monitoring the stream requires a superhuman effort. The mere mortals among us can only pay attention to the pull requests we’ve authored or are tasked with reviewing. What’s surprising is that the watching functionality provided by GitHub is so coarse-grained. The dial apparently only has settings for “0” and “11”.
Spencer Kimball
March 23, 2016
Company
Hello, world
Databases are the beating heart of every business in the world, running the gamut from humble spreadsheets to thousands of servers linked into vast supercomputers. And they’ve been evolving rapidly. Most of us at Cockroach Labs have spent our careers watching them progress, often actively struggling to overcome their limitations when the task at hand outstripped their capabilities. But first, why “Cockroach”? If you can get past their grotesque outer aspect, you’ve got to give them credit for sheer resilience. You’ve heard the theory that cockroaches will be the only survivors post-apocalypse? Turns out modern database systems have a lot to gain by emulating one of nature’s oldest and most successful designs. Survive, replicate, proliferate. That’s been the cockroach model for geological ages, and it’s ours too. It doesn’t hurt that the name itself is resilient to being forgotten.
Spencer Kimball
June 4, 2015