- intro
- world’s most developer friendly database
- worst year of my life and why that means you should try EdgeDB
- CW: brief mentions of depression, mental health
- in 2022
- marriage of almost 15 years ended
- had to sell my house in Seattle
- daughter’s depression and some other mental health issues became much more pronounced
- life became very difficult for her and for us as well
- also the year I started my job at EdgeDB
- first or second week after I started, my daughter didn’t come home from school one day
- tracked her phone to the school where I found her backpack hidden in a bush with her phone inside
- tried reaching out to her friends
- called the police
- told them I wanted to file a missing person report
- they promised to send an officer to my home to take the report
- Spent the next 7 hours
- waited until about 2am for that officer to arrive
- that was all I could do
- next day was a work day
- knew I wouldn’t be worth much that day
- worried whether I would be able to keep the job
- called Yury CEO to let him know
- gave him an out since I knew this was a bad look
- he said it was fine and asked if I needed more time off
- last thing I needed at that point was to be unemployed
- Did find her. Everyone is more or less OK now.
- Ned’s keynote yesterday inspired me to think about communication, but I went broader and thought about what our actions communicate
- EdgeDB’s treatment of me when I was totally unproven communicated that they saw me as a human being
- cared about more than what I contributed to the company
- wanted me to succeed
- design decisions of our database convey that same focus to our users — we want all of you to succeed
- small- autocomplete in our CLI
- big- entirely new query language, built from the ground up for developers
- at any point in this design, would have made an easier, less costly choice if not for that human-centric — in this case developer-centric — outlook
- a focus on people
- hard
- expensive
- time consuming
- leaves you vulnerable
- but it made a huge difference for me
- and I think it could make at least a small difference for you too