May 2021 Summaries

CockroachDB is a database designed from day one for multi-region applications, making it easy to build and deploy an application across multiple regions in three steps. Firstly, deploy your application into multiple regions with no required changes. Secondly, deploy your database into multiple regions using CockroachDB's node startup locality options or automatically set by CockroachDB Dedicated. Lastly, enhance your multi-region database with optional configurations like region survivability, table locality settings (regional tables, regional by row tables, and global tables), and more. This approach ensures low-latency reads and writes for all tables in a multi-region database from the first region, while also providing increased fault tolerance and availability.

Cockroach Labs has released CockroachDB 21.1, a new version of its distributed SQL database designed for multi-region data management. The update simplifies the process of managing data across multiple cloud availability zones and regions to optimize latency and availability. It also includes improvements in query optimization, JSON and spatial data storage, compatibility with developer tools, and more. CockroachDB 21.1 enables developers to easily scale data across regions for faster, more reliable user experiences.

Cockroach Labs offers inclusive parental benefits for all its employees, regardless of gender or how the new family member is arriving. Parents who have worked at Cockroach Labs for 30 days or more are eligible for up to 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave, with an additional two weeks of PTO available. The company also provides a comprehensive Preparing for Parental Leave Guide and a Return to Roach Guide for parents returning from leave. In addition, Cockroach Labs offers various perks such as welcome packs, $500 baby bucks bonus, access to lactation and sleep consultants through Cleo, and a ReRoachmate program that connects returning parents with parenting peers. The company plans to develop leave guides for managers in the future and is partnering with Cocoon to improve the overall leave experience for its employees.

Cockroach Labs has restructured its engineering interview process to enhance fairness, reduce bias, and better reflect real-world engineering tasks. This overhaul, initiated in mid-2017, involved eliminating resumes, implementing exercise-based interviews, and open-sourcing the process on GitHub to familiarize candidates with the format. Traditional interviews, which heavily relied on real-time coding questions, have been replaced with a more consistent approach that includes take-home exercises, a reduced question repository for uniformity, and a "Choose Your Own" systems design question for deeper insights into a candidate's experience. These changes aim to provide stronger hiring signals, reduce intimidation, and ensure candidates face challenges similar to those they would encounter in their roles. While still in early stages, Cockroach Labs is collecting data and feedback to evaluate the effectiveness of these adjustments, hoping to inspire other companies to share and refine their hiring practices.

ZITADEL is a modern cloud-native IAM platform that integrates authentication and authorization needs without the need for running custom code. It was built to address the gaps in existing identity and access management platforms, such as weak audit trails, high costs, and difficulty scaling across regions and clouds. The platform relies on CockroachDB due to its ability to handle Event Sourcing (ES) and Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS), strong consistency, great availability guarantees, cloud-native design, easy automation, and horizontal scalability. ZITADEL is currently deployed in parallel on GCP and Cloudscale, both providers with data centers in Switzerland. The future of identity and access management includes features like changefeeds for accelerating backend processes and geo-partitioning to allow customers to choose where their data is stored.

Inc. Magazine has included Cockroach Labs on its annual Best Workplaces list for 2021. The comprehensive measurement of American companies evaluated factors such as management effectiveness, perks, and fostering employee growth. Despite the challenges posed by the pandemic, Cockroach Labs has maintained a focus on building a human-forward business that balances employees' professional and personal lives. They continue to strive for an innovative and inclusive workplace.

Cockroach Labs has implemented an open interview process that aims to reduce bias and create a more inclusive recruiting experience. By removing resumes, emphasizing exercise-based interviews, and making interview prep materials openly available, the company strives to eliminate hurdles for candidates and provide them with a transparent view of the entire recruiting cycle. The process is designed to focus on each candidate's skills and performance rather than their background or ability to answer trick questions. This approach helps ensure that interviews are challenging but fair, allowing candidates to be their best selves and showcase their strengths effectively.

This article discusses how to model JSON data in a Go application using CockroachDB. It explains that many applications benefit from representing some data in a relational structure and some data in a more flexible document structure like JSON. The author demonstrates how to create a simple Go app with a products table, where each product has SKU, name, and extra attributes stored as JSONB. The article also shows how to use the pgx database driver to automatically marshal and unmarshal values into JSON. Furthermore, it explains how to build JSON documents from relational data directly in the database using functions like jsonb_agg and jsonb_build_object. Overall, leveraging JSON functionality in a relational database can reduce the need for a dedicated object database, minimize infrastructure and application complexity, and improve performance.

Amruta Ranade shares her journey of transitioning from a Tech Writer to a Developer Advocate at Cockroach Labs. She leveraged the company's Flex Friday program, which allowed employees to learn and experiment with projects outside their job descriptions, to research and try out different aspects of DevRel. The Learning is Good program provided financial support for conference travel. After envisioning herself in the role of a Developer Advocate, she utilized Cockroach Labs' internal mobility program, Roachermobile, which allowed her to interview for an internal role change after meeting expectations in her current role for at least one year. With the support of her manager and team, Amruta successfully transitioned into her new role as a Developer Advocate.