Moin Moin,
I am a fan and user of CouchDB since 2007. At this time CouchDB wasn’t an ASF project and Jan Lehnardt (@janl) took the mission to promote CouchDB. It was a good time because NoSQL databases started to emerge. Btw - CouchDB was publicly introduced in 2005 by it’s creator Damien Katz.
Well coming from a relational world (http://www.pg-praxisbuch.de) it took me some time to get the big picture. But after playing around with it (must have been 0.6 or so) I really started to like it a lot. At this time Benoit Chesneau (@benoitc) took over the fork for couchapp - complete web applications served solely by CouchDB. I took part in the discussion show that could work out.
In late 2008 CouchDB became a Apache project.
Well in 2011, Galileo Computing asked me if I would write a book about CouchDB. It was 1.1 and 1.2 was just next door. I decided to take the chance and asked awesome Till Klampaeckel (@klimpong) if he would write the book with me. Luckily he said yes and imho the book is really cool! Unfortunately the book did not run well in Germany so Galileo decided just some days ago to remove it (if you are interested in a copy ping me!).
As I am not an Erlang expert yet I never really contributed to the project but had always the fan cap on my head. I was still in contact with Jan and after having met him and Till at JSConf 2013 in Berlin I asked what would be a good contribution. He said that the documentation should be translated. Bingo. I like writing and I like documentation and I like translating (a bit ;-) ). But what I like most is contributing in such a cool project. So around two months ago I started a post that I would like to integrate L10n into CouchDB. The feedback was really big. Well my proposals seemed to be good and a project like Apache CouchDB needs people to push the parts they want to contribute. So I was really overwhelmed when Noah Slater (@nslater) and the core team invited me to become a CouchDB committer. Wow. That’s really awesome. I feel honoured and I am strongly motivated to do my best for CouchDB.
Thanks to the CouchDB core committers and community for electing me.
If you are interested in contributing to the integration of L10n into CouchDB or contributing in general please don’t wait to ping me at andywenk@apache.org.
Here are some links for you:
http://couchdb.apache.org
http://docs.couchdb.org/en/latest
http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb
http://couchdb-buch.de/
IRC: irc.freenode.com -> #couchdb
Cheers
Andy