April 14 2026 will mark one year since I signed my offer letter to become a Couchbaser.
A lot has changed since then.
I am taking this rare opportunity on a Sunday with my fiancee away and a bad knee injury sustained slide tackling last Sunday, to reflect briefly on one year at Couchbase.
When the official day arrives, I know I'll be too busy to write this, so I'm getting ahead of it now.
I'll start by saying, I never thought I'd work for a database company but I'm glad that I do.
Many people here have worked in the database space for years and large portions of their careers, for some, the entirety of them.
With roots and pioneering work in caching and non relational databases, back when I was playing Farmville (like many of us) on Facebook, Couchbase has always been ahead of the curve.
Operational Data Platform for AI
This year we firmly cemented ourselves as an operational data platform for AI with significant releases in Couchbase 8.0 and AI Services.
During this time, I have been working with enterprise prospects and customers to understand Couchbase's differentiated architecture and run their applications optimally on our data platform.
AI maturity levels vary but everyone understands the necessity of having a strategic plan to work towards it, either through integration for existing applications, or entirely new proof of concepts to graduate into new applications.
Change is an Uncommon Certainty
At Couchbase, the change inside is a reflection of the change outside. Nobody is shielded from strong external market forces. This is the first time I've been at a company that was purchased. Haveli Investments is a strategic technology private equity firm that identified Couchbase as an opportunity to at least 5x and grow from a couple hundred million to a billion dollar revenue tech unicorn.
No Day is the Same. Variety is the Spice of Life
In a year, I've worked with over roughly thirty enterprise customers, a few large enough to graduate to strategic. I have been surprised at the level of technological breadth and depth required to solve problems, a testament to the sophistication of both a customer's applications and our technology.
No day is the same.
I may be:
- Demonstrating an iOS mobile application running offline on Couchbase Lite and syncing local document changes over App Services when connectivity is restored to Capella.
- Running Couchbase Server with the Operator for Kubernetes and troubleshooting helm chart YAML configurations to run optimal cluster and bucket configurations.
- Building, presenting (and blogging about it... more on that soon), an agentic demo healthcare application using LangGraph as an agent orchestration framework, Couchbase Agent Catalog to store, embed and version prompts, tools and traces, and AI Services for a secure LLM and Embedding Model, deployed next to data in Capella in the Model Service.
- Running vector search proof of concepts, bringing audio datasets to life at the edge with embeddings, and offline vector searches, using our .NET vector extension.
- Optimizing SQL++ queries, indexes, rearchitecting for service isolation, avoiding resource contention, horizontal, vertical and disk autoscaling, and ensuring submillisecond query latency and avoiding excessive CPU, RAM utilization.
- On premise testing DML statements, copying, querying and indexing Parquet in a local Hadoop cluster from a Couchbase enterprise analytics cluster.
Simple Infrastructure. Maximum Flexibility
We give customers deployment flexibility and the ability to store data offline, cache and deliver it quickly, move it to the cloud, and keep everything in sync, without the headaches of patching these systems together and using a suite of third party vendors, each with their own pricing, support, licences and addition to the TCO equation.
In my experience of building applications, simple is best when it comes to infrastructure, and this is especially true for AI and Agentic applications where you're now also dealing with unreliability and non deterministic outcomes. This is very hard to control and scale without the right infrastructure.
It is always hard as an individual going through this experience to reflect on my own growth but I have made progress and feel more confident that I can ensure my customers are able to get value from the Couchbase data platform. A lot of value for many is still to be realized, as we work through upgrades and rolling out new AI features, where I know the infrastructure complexity becomes an extremely painful problem and real blocker to groundbreaking innovation.
I Have a Very Specific Set of Skills. Name That Movie...
As a Solutions Engineer, I am perhaps unusual in that I do write code every single day, a lot of it is for learning and understanding of the Platform, versus production code used by customers (for now...). It is used for building concepts and demonstrating possible applications that can run on our platform. PatientIQ was full stack and challenged me to build the frontend in React, backend in Python with FastAPI, orchestrate agents with LangGraph, integrate agents with Couchbase Agent Catalog, store and query operational and vector data from Capella.
I also spend every day selling (mainly consultative, value based), on sales calls with prospective customers, platform education and expansion with existing customers, but directly influencing and contributing to both pipeline and revenue generation. I've been developing my skills to be equally confident when demonstrating Mobile, Kubernetes, Server as I am with Capella because customers should run workloads where it makes the most sense for them, cloud is not the only option.
I work on both skills because my value lives at the intersection of the two.
Couchbase 2030. Work Together. 5x Yourself
Very often, I do not have the answer. Yes, with AI, it can be simpler to get an answer quickly but the best answers still require cross functional collaboraton, across Sales, Product, Engineering, Cloud Architecture, Support, and I've spent a lot of time working with people in all of these departments.
I have a lot of personal development, goals, plans, I'm working on to continue growing at Couchbase but as I write this it becomes clearer on the growth I've already experienced.
The next 4 years, Couchbase 2030, we will try to 5x the company. I want to 5x myself on this journey. Each year will be an opportunity for reflection and it all starts with a single sentence.