That's correct. Bufstream is not open source, but we do have a demo that you can try. I've asked the team to include a proper LICENSE file as well. Thanks for catching that!
That's correct. We hop onto Zoom calls with our customers on an agreed cadence, and they share a billing report with us to confirm usage/metering. For enterprise customers specifically, it works great. They don't want to violate contracts, and it also gives us a natural check-in point to ensure things are going smoothly with their deployment.
Nope! We're still heavily investing in scaling Protobuf. In fact, our data quality guarantees built into Bufstream are powered by Protobuf! This is simply an extension of what we do...Connect RPC, Buf CLI, etc.
I think that's not true. There are plenty of incremental ways to adopt gRPC. For example, there are packages that can facade/match your existing REST APIs[1][2].
Protobuf can typically be about 70-80% smaller than the equivalent JSON payloads. If you care about Network I/O costs (at a large scale), you'd probably want to realize a benefit in cost savings like that.
Additionally, I think people put a lot of trust into JSON parsers across ecosystems "just working", and I think that's something more people should look into (it's worse than you think): https://seriot.ch/projects/parsing_json.html
I think it's helpful for engineering managers to be technically conversant at a fairly deep level with the technical challenges and domains the team deals with regularly. My reports have told me that in the past, this bolstered their trust in my decision-making and gave me deeper credibility overall.
I didn't do anything terribly difficult/deep, but I think it conveyed a strong, empathetic connection to what they were dealing with that mattered to them.
Its not that complex. CouchDB is the core technology that Couchbase and BigCouch, et. al are using to power their more "vertical" offerings, in various degrees. CouchDB is not going anywhere, and its a great standalone product.
This is where actual innovation is happening. I'm not at all discouraged by the FUD being perpetuated by Katz today. I have a fairly modest BigCouch deployment in production and I am very happy with it. haters gonna hate.
I really want to believe the mouthpiece over at Microsoft, he makes a convincing argument, "nobody is skilled in HTML _5_", what does that even mean? Clearly this guy doesn't even know what he is battling here.
Everyone knows business apps don't need to be cross platform, and none of us know what we're doing. I won't even waste my time listing the tools available for modern JS projects, especially for data-centric applications.
What we need are MORE single-platform alternatives! Because anyone who is actually getting work done, is doing it on the platform made by the company who is writing my checks!