Insight

Harsh Shah, a senior staff solutions engineer at Cockroach Labs, followed his dad into the database business. He says his father, now retired, worked as an Oracle DBA for over 20 years. He remembers the lengthy periods during his childhood when his father would be on call at odd hours in case an issue with the clients’ database cropped up. Decades later, and now a software engineer himself, he remembers showing his father the Cockroach technology, to which he responded, incredulous: “Are you serious? This is what’s possible now?” Cockroach DB is a distributed SQL database, and like its namesake, it’s almost impossible to kill. In the event of an outage, the data will have been replicated across a number of nodes, and so if one node goes down, or even a whole datacentre, the database, like a cockroach, will just keep on running.

Cockroach Labs was founded in 2015 by three ex-Google employees, Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis and Ben Darnell. But the origin story starts 20 years before, when Kimball and Mattis were computer science students, and roommates, at UC Berkeley. As the tale goes, they decided they're rather make an open source image manipulation program than write a compiler for their coursework, and in January 1996, they released GIMP to the world. According to TechCrunch, which has an exhaustive article on the origins of the company, GIMP led to jobs at Google, as well as a personal acknowledgement from Larry Page and Sergey Brin, because Brin had actually used their program to design the very first chunky Google logo.