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Imagine this: you work in system architecture for a multibillion-dollar consumer-facing business, and it’s the middle of a busy weekend. Suddenly, your database goes down. Transactions aren’t processing. Customers are angry. Logistical issues are stacking up because inventory and warehouse tracking are down. Customer service reps are swamped, but half of the technical staff are twiddling their thumbs because they can’t do their work without a functional database.

Charlie Custer

June 3, 2021

We are pleased to announce that our second paper, Enabling the Next Generation of Multi-Region Applications with CockroachDB, will appear in the Industry Track of the ACM SIGMOD 2022 conference in Philadelphia, PA (as well as remotely), on June 12-17. This paper is the sequel to our SIGMOD 2020 paper in which we introduced CockroachDB’s geo-distributed capabilities to the world.

Slow applications kill business. Greg Lindon (in this now archived deck), noted that 100ms in latency lowered Amazon’s sales by 1%. Marissa Mayer pointed out that speed really matters when she explained the results of A/B tests as “500ms of additional load time dropped Google searches by 20%.”

Andy Woods

May 20, 2021

Welcoming a child while working at a tech startup can seem like an overwhelming life change. In a world where everyone is already strapped for time, you’re going to take three months away from your role!? It sounds scary, but at Cockroach Labs, we’re working on ways to make this stressful time easier, and I’m excited to share more about our programs for Roachers who are starting or growing their families. For starters, if you think the technology industry is just startups full of recent college graduates, think again! At Cockroach, our average employee is 36 years old. 30% of our team has children, and we average 2 children per family with more Little Roachers on the way!

For many engineers, thinking about spending countless hours of studying for coding interviews leaves them exhausted before they even get started. At Cockroach Labs, we have open sourced the interview process on Github to create familiarity for candidates and removed resumes and utilized exercise-based interviews to reduce bias. Beginning in mid-2017, we engaged with our engineering team on how we can make our engineering interview process less intimidating and more fair, resulting in better hiring decisions.

Lindsay Grenawalt

May 17, 2021

The identity and access management platforms that I either used or researched in the past always left much to be desired. Most times their audit trails aren’t strong enough. Pricing per user or per session is too expensive. They don’t deploy easily in multiple regions. And they aren’t exactly easy to operate or scale across clouds. There was clearly a gap in the market for a modern IAM platform. I needed such a platform in order to properly do my previous job as a Head of eGovernment and IAM (in Switzerland). But such a platform didn’t exist! This is when we began thinking through and building the platform that has become ZITADEL today. Jump straight to the architecture.

Cockroach Labs was named for resilience and survival. The last year has tested us all in unimaginable ways, and it was the strength and resilience of our team and our community that kept us afloat and propelled us forward. So it is an absolute honor that, after the year we’ve all had, we have been named to Inc. Magazine’s annual list of the Best Workplaces for 2021.

Lindsay Grenawalt

May 12, 2021

At Cockroach Labs, we’ve long worked at reducing bias for better, more inclusive recruiting outcomes. We do this by removing resumes throughout the hiring process so that interviewers can focus on you, the candidate— not your background. We also emphasize exercise-based interviews that give people the opportunity to demonstrate that they can do the job instead of recounting past experience. These practices are rooted in a basic, human principle for hiring: as a company looking for amazing talent, we want to eliminate hurdles that might keep you from showing us your strengths in an interview, not create them. Four years ago, we saw another opportunity to help people put their best foot forward: we decided to make our interview prep materials openly available.

*Guest post alert! Jack is a core maintainer of pgx, a PostgreSQL driver and toolkit for Go. He helped build the testing integration for CockroachDB and pgx. Jack blogs at https://www.jackchristensen.com/* -– Many applications benefit from representing some data in a relational structure and some data in a more flexible document structure like JSON. Taking advantage of the JSON functionality available in a relational database can reduce the need for a dedicated object database, minimize infrastructure and application complexity, and improve performance.