In our latest interview for Get to Know Our Couchbase Community Champions, we meet Shivansh Srivastava from Delhi, India.
Tell us about yourself and what you do in your daily role?
I consider myself to be a polyglot developer and a Scala, Spark, and Couchbase aficionado. I like to contribute to Open Source projects, and have contributed to projects like Apache iota, Apache Spark, Apache CarbonData, Couchbase-Spark-Connector, Akka, Alpakka, and many others. I’ve a keen interest in upcoming technologies like IoT, deep learning, etc. Currently, I’m employed as a Sr. Software Engineer at Chirpanywhere Inc, an IoT-based startup, where my main work is to manage many things from programming to designing the whole solution and deploying it. I’m also interested in building communities and am currently building my own community, Internity, to revolutionize the learning in colleges in India.
Where are you based and what do you like to do in your spare time?
I am currently based in Delhi, India. In my spare time I like to contribute to community building and help out others so they do not get stuck on the same problems I have experienced. Hence, I like to respond on Stackoverflow, write blogs, and learn from online courses (i.e., Coursera and edX, etc.). I also want to build a community offline, which is why I started the Internity initiative.
What made you choose Couchbase?
We’ve explored many options, but we chose Couchbase because of some pretty cool features like user-friendly UI, hence the cost of database management was reduced. It was in-memory, therefore, the reads were quite fast, and it has Couchbase Full Text Search (CBFT), which provides all the benefits of using a single database.
What one feature of Couchbase do you use and what should people know about it?
One feature is getting nearly ACID properties in a NoSQL database. Using the approach stated in Pro Couchbase Server by David Ostrovsky, Yaniv Rodenski, and Mohammed Haji, we formulated our solution and we were able to get nearly ACID properties in Couchbase. This book is a must-read.
What have you accomplished using Couchbase?
Earlier, I worked with a company related to the stock market and the data was semi-structured. With Couchbase, we were able to apply real-time N1QL queries to the data and integrate with Spark using the Spark-Couchbase Connector. And using Couchbase-Elastic river plugin to transfer data directly to ElasticSearch using the Couchbase UI is very user-friendly. There were many things we did not need to write code for that was managed by Couchbase itself, and the Couchbase UI has been very helpful in monitoring it as well.
If you could have three wishes for Couchbase what would they be?
My three wishes would be:
1. Increase the writing speed of the data which can be achieved in the near future.
2. Develop some compression algorithm like Pied Piper in Silicon Valley and inculcate into Couchbase to deal with the data volume.
3. To keep on increasing the open source activities to promote open source culture in other companies too.
What is your favorite book or author, and why?
My favourite book is Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Peter Norvig and Stuart J. Russell because of the ease with which they have explained such difficult topics. I also love to read biographies and autobiographies and am currently reading Playing It My Way, by Boria Majumdar and Sachin Tendulkar.
