The author discusses their experience with Apache Zeppelin, a web-based notebook for real-time analytics, and their efforts to extend its functionality by creating a Couchbase N1QL interpreter. While Zeppelin supports multiple backends through interpreters, the author focuses on enabling N1QL queries within Zeppelin by implementing a custom interpreter that handles query transformation and result formatting. This involves extending the abstract class org.apache.zeppelin.interpreter.Interpreter and implementing necessary methods for managing connections and interpreting queries. The author provides an example using game data to demonstrate the functionality and mentions potential improvements like autocomplete and support for geospatial queries and Couchbase FTS. The development of this plugin is shared on GitHub, encouraging feedback and contributions from the community.