The Geek Talk

Who is Chris Anderson?

I got into computers as a kid running BBS’s and hacking whatever language fit the job: BASIC, C, Pascal, and finally HTML. Remember when you did background images by adding an attribute to the body tag? I also use to build remote control cars and roller blade. Total geek. :)

I mostly kept away from coding during college – I think my plate was just too full with making music and studying Analytic Philosophy. I coded a little for a course on artificial life and complexity theory (cross-listed in Philosophy and Math), and of course I wrote my share of HTML websites.

Reed College is a bit different from most schools – there is a lot of adventurous DIY spirit there, people weld together tall bikes and stuff. I was the guy in the ironic punk band who recorded every else’s music. I’ve recorded everything from Disco to Clown Core metal bands.

I still do some music, although it takes up much less of my time these days. I bet a lot of you have seen the [CouchDB music video]. Claire McCabe, who costars in the video, is a friend and bandmate from the Reed College days.

My wife Amy is also a Reedie, she cameos in the video too. We’ve got an almost 6 month old daughter. I highly recommend it. On the other hand, I live in the suburbs now – never thought I’d say that.

Where and when did you start programming?

After college I started to get fed up with the idea that all this music I was recording was just being burned to a few CDs and barely distributed. I joined a crazy team of cousins (Greg Borenstein and Jem Axelrod) who were running an online music website that mailed out CDs for bands. I offered to migrate them off the Filemaker Pro webserver system, and add the ability to sell MP3 downloads to the site.

The project was called Music For Dozens. I learned PHP to build the site, and also built a bunch of other fun things into it over time (cloned the del.icio.us nested tag-browser interface, a bunch of other easter eggs). I have immense respect for PHP, because I did all that without any idea of tests or even version control. If I recall correctly you can hack PHP apps without using the Terminal much. I remember the first time I had to compile PHP5 on Dreamhost I was up all night trying to figure it out. The site ran without issue for years until we stopped paying the bill.

Music for Dozens spawned Grabb.it (a playlist sharing site), which eventually pivoted into a recommendation engine for bands to find the right blogs to promote their music to. We used Hadoop and Hpricot to spider the web for mp3s, and that was my introduction to CouchDB. After using it a few months I taught myself Erlang, and never looked back.

You favorite language? and why?

These days it is JavaScript, warts and all. The reason why is because as far as I’m concerned the browser is the only runtime that matters, so you better learn to program it. As you really learn JavaScript you realize it’s got some features that are very hard to do without once you are used to them.

Erlang is also badass – once you are over the syntax it is clear that it’s like JavaScript, without the ambiguities, and with a unique way to model concurrency. It’s not the kind of language you can pick up in a weekend, though. Aspects of it are still sinking in for me after years of the stuff.

What does your typical day look like?

Ha. Either I work from home or I drive to Oakland (or sometimes to “the Penninsula”). Either way, these days I spend most of my time in meetings. I miss full-time coding, but I feel like it’s worth it for me to take a bigger picture approach. You have to do that if you want to run an organization with more than 10 or so people.

Pushing CouchDB forward through people work instead of hacking seems to take a bit longer, but I think I can contribute more like this, in the long run.

What do you do in your free time?

Play with my daughter, noodle on the bass guitar, read, walk the dogs. My wife and I talk about taking up sailing, but that’s not something you do when you have a newborn.

Current favorite apps?

I just finished Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit on the iPad. I’m helplessly addicted to Quora, it’s my new Hacker News.

What OS do you prefer?

Ubuntu on the server. Other than that I rock a MacBook Air 11″ because it makes everyone else’s computer look silly big.

Small picture for your Workplace?

The CouchOne offices are super relaxed. We have a couch that looks like the CouchDB logo. We have open-source Friday most weeks (tweet ahead to be sure) and we love visitors those days.

Name something that has inspired you recently?

I think it’s pretty amazing how far Salvatore Sanfilippo has been able to push Redis, while writing most of the code himself.

What do you prefer (and why)? Freelance work or full time employment?

I like the hacking challenges of freelance work, but not the client interactions. I’ve been doing some architecture reviews for Couch projects lately, so that’s best of both worlds.

What are your personal projects and goals for 2011?

2010 kinda crushed me – I think I spent more time learning how to be President / CFO than writing code. Now I’m a little more up to speed on the business side, so I should be able to devote some energy to tech again.

I would like to see a new wave of CouchApp tools and users. Maybe something radically different from what we have now. Dale Harvey and Benoît Chesneau are working an version of the CouchApp toolchain that would make the developer experience much more PHP-like (eg no Terminal). I think once we have that and a bunch more documentation, we’ll really be able to push the CouchApp train forward.

I’d like to learn to write mobile phone apps. I have some ideas for cool stuff that could use GeoCouch and the phone’s camera to make ad-hoc p2p picture sharing (wouldn’t it be cool if you could see other pictures from the same event as you as they were being taken?).