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Remember when people’s vacuum cleaners and doorbells stopped working because a region of AWS went down? That won’t happen to anyone using our smart home products. Levven had been in the electronics manufacturing industry for decades before “smart technology” paved the way for “smart homes”. When that happened we saw an opportunity to help make homes more affordable by designing and manufacturing smart home controls that reduce build costs. By eliminating the wire between the wall switch and the light we can offer consumers more eco-friendly home construction saving precious resources. At Levven we added smart home controls manufacturing 5 years ago - but our cloud connectivity is new. Levven’s goal is to make homes more affordable to build, purchase, and operate for the masses with smart controls. In order to do that we need to build scale-out, low maintenance infrastructure that keeps the cost to the end user low, while also guaranteeing that our smart home controls will always work. To help us address this IoT challenge we chose CockroachDB’s managed service offering: CockroachDB Dedicated. In this blog we’ll explain how we’ve built IoT application architecture that keeps smart devices available at all times.

G’day! I’m Oliver, a Member of Technical Staff here at Cockroach Labs. After spending the better part of 5 years in the United States, I decided to come back home to Sydney, Australia. With my homecoming, I’m happy to announce that Cockroach Labs is hiring people to work with us from Sydney, Australia! If you’re curious about me, my journey, and why I’m at Cockroach, read on. Of course, if the news of an opening sounds good, you can jump straight to the job openings we have in Sydney.

The CockroachDB Docs site is home to our product documentation for CockroachDB and CockroachDB Dedicated, our two product offerings. It includes reference documentation, conceptual documentation, developer guides, tutorials, and much more. Cockroach Labs has always prioritized its documentation, investing in it from very early in the company’s existence. We believe clear, concise, and helpful docs are important in enabling our users to be self-sufficient in testing, deploying, and interacting with our products. They’re an important tool that internal users, such as Support and Sales, also reference. Each document goes through a thorough research, draft, and review process– and while our Docs team owns the process, it’s a collaborative effort. Many times, a cross-functional group made up of engineers, product managers, designers, customer success– even members from our community!– will contribute.

CREWS (Cockroach Employees Who Support) are groups intended to create an inclusive environment for Roachers from underrepresented backgrounds and help employees connect with their peers on a deeper level. Groups host events and develop programs to support and advocate for their members, both internally and externally. While these groups are company-sponsored, they are run by employees for employees.

Innovative fintech organizations built from the ground up to be agile, data-driven, and cloud-native are driving traditional banks and financial services organizations to adopt cloud-native infrastructure. In order to remain competitive and relevant, banks are modernizing operations, replacing legacy systems like Oracle, IBM DB2, and others. Moreover, to keep pace with fintech organizations, banks are turning to the cloud.

Jessica Edwards

February 25, 2021

he thought of developing a solution for “epidemic management” was not what Quarano engineers had in mind this time last year. In fact, Quarano’s story started just a few months ago at a government-sponsored hackathon in Germany. At the hackathon, over 40,000+ participants were asked to build applications and services to help manage and decrease the spread of COVID-19.

Cassie McAllister

February 23, 2021

A few days ago, prompted by a Hacker News post, my friend Ivo texted me saying “Does your head ever explode when you’re thinking about databases and consistency semantics and whatever models? It just sounds like pointless taxonomy stuff. We are <N, K>-serializable whereas QuinoaDB is only ü-serializable”. The answer is yes — my head does explode. I don’t think it’s pointless, though, although I agree that the discussions are generally unproductive.

It’s been over six years since CockroachDB became a GitHub project. In that time, the project has racked up more than 20,000 GitHub stars, which is a simple way for GitHub users to bookmark repositories that interest them. Naturally, we’ve wondered how people find out about our project. Are there things we could do to accelerate awareness and interest?

Spencer Kimball

February 22, 2021

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, there has been a massive traffic spike in everything digital--from online shopping to remote learning. Under the hood, companies responsible for these technologies have had to quickly adapt to handle the growth in users. Having an elastically scalable and cloud-native stack--all the way down to the database--has helped ease this transition. One such company that experienced a pandemic-driven surge in popularity was UNIwise, an education tech company based in Denmark that sells an online test platform called WISEflow.

Dan Kelly

February 19, 2021