Jan Lehnardt is an Open Source software consultant spcialising in internet technologies. Jan is the co-founder of Freisatz, a company bringing typographic bliss to everyone and a contributor to the CouchDB project. He has years of experience with building small and big-scale database backed applications and has a keen eye for user experience and typography.




CouchDB is a document oriented database. It does not adhere to the relational principles of traditional databases. While there is not much room for technical details, we try to cover some of the cool things CouchDB uses Erlang for to present a super simple yet professional data storage model and the basis for Erlang-style high concurrency and fault tolerance.

Since its beginnings around three years ago, CouchDB went from a self-funded, single-developer project to a small community project under the hood of the Apache Software Foundation and with the lead developer Damien Katz being paid by IBM to work fulltime on CouchDB.