This is a strange time for us all. The COVID19 crisis will leave an indelible mark – we’ll never forget the Spring and Summer spent fighting the virus. We send love to everybody out there, Terminator and non-Terminator alike. This is hard and it’s going to be hard and there is no way around that.
TerminusDB is small and tightly knit core team. We were mostly remote before the crisis hit and are 100% remote now. It has been a difficult time for us all, but we are united and hope we will grow stronger in the face of the pandemic. The primary principle of TerminusDB is asabiyyah. It’s an Islamic term described by Ibn Khaldoun in his book Muqaddimah – he calls it the bond of cohesion among humans in a group that forms a society. Khaldoun lived in Tunisia in the 14th century and observed the cohesiveness of the nomadic tribes that lived in the hinterland of Tunis. That cohesion was born out of shared struggle.
We have a saying in Ireland - Ní neart go cur le chéile - there is no strength without unity. TerminusDB hopes to grow the unity of our community through this difficult time.
So in that spirit, we are really excited to introduce the TerminusDB Community. It is great to bring everybody together in one place. Check it out here.
The beating heart of the community is our Discord Server. Since the crisis started, we’ve been using Discord and we love the platform. We can pair program, live code to an audience, we can have drop-in voice meetings - it just feels flexible and open. If you don't know Discord (I didn't until recently), I'm sure you'll find it amazing. Really intuitive and built for collaboration - gamers and streamers do it better obviously. We'll be doing mini-MeetUps with live code sessions, we'll get into the guts of terminus-store, we'll announce features and much more. We want to make the community server the beating heart of our world. We’ll build asabiyyah there.
We also have a forum, but it will take a little longer to get enough content up to make it useful (we will be putting effort in there as well as on StackOverflow etc.). Come join us to chat on our Discord channel. All the core engineers are there and are happy to help!
In other exciting pivots to internet and gaming platform news, we have a twitch channel! Our DevRel Champion Cheuk is streaming on her channel too. The artwork for ‘World of WoqlCraft’ (the w
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We are going to have a regular weekly webinar and podcast called ‘Terminators on Tech’ at 4pm BST/IST every Thursday.
The last couple of webinars - DataOps 101 and The Anatomy of a Knowledge Graph are available over on our new YouTube channel
As you can see, a whole bunch of new things.
Since we started TerminusDB, we’ve been hosting weekly discussions led by a different team member. They can be about anything really, but have a tendency to be tech-focused - we really value these discussions and thought the broader TerminusDB Community might also enjoy. We’ve started recording the discussions and uploading them to our YouTube channel (playlist). Blog about how it all began.
As I write this, I realise that it has been too long since the last one as I have too many new things to announce - we have a new blog site, we will also be syndicating to our Dev.to community page and our Medium page.
Notable blog highlights:
Why Graph will Win kicked off a furious discussion on r/programming on Reddit - some people were not happy.
Reluctantly Remote, and Loving It about our recently changed circumstances.
Great series of introductory tutorials:
Finally, after all the community and communications, we have been furiously building the database. All is there to see over on GitHub. It is in great shape.
We now have a one-click deploy with heroku. We also have our updated console and TerminusHub just around the corner. You’ll be able to easily push a dataset to a collaborator (across a decentralized network) or pull a database from the central TerminusHub. Branching live databases then merging back to the master. Data like code - and a ‘Git for Data’ (white paper on what we’re talking about)
A few tasters to whet your appetite: