Our friends at Docker recently added an official RethinkDB repository to the Docker Hub. They announced the new repo in a blog post yesterday, highlighting RethinkDB alongside several other prominent open source projects.

Docker is a tool that helps automate deployments. It takes advantage of platform-level container technology to make it easy to compose isolated software components in a reproducible way. A growing number of infrastructure-related tools, ranging from self-hosted PaaS environments to cluster management systems, are built around the Docker ecosystem.

We’re teaming up with AirPair to support their $100k developer writing competition. We’ve sponsored a $500 cash prize to honor the best RethinkDB post submitted to the contest.

AirPair, which provides a service that connects developers with experts for live programming sessions, recently introduced an experimental set of social authoring features that make it possible for authors and readers to collaborate on content. AirPair’s social authoring platform uses a GitHub-based workflow that involves forking and pull requests. They launched a writing competition to highlight the experiment and encourage developers to give it a try.

Dan Cannon’s project, GoRethink, is among the most popular and well-maintained third-party client drivers for RethinkDB. Dan recently updated the driver to make it compatible with RethinkDB 1.16, adding support for changefeeds. The language’s native concurrency features make it easy to consume changefeeds in a realtime Go application.

To see GoRethink in action, I built a simple IRC bot that monitors a RethinkDB cluster and sends notifications to an IRC channel when issues are detected. I built the bot with Go, using Dan’s driver and an IRC client library called GoIRC.

When we announced the RethinkDB 1.16 last week, we showed how you can use changefeeds with the new ReQL-based admin API to monitor the status of a RethinkDB cluster. In this blog post, I’m going to expand on that example and show you how I used the same underlying RethinkDB features to build a realtime cluster monitoring dashboard with live graphs—much like the dashboard built into the RethinkDB web UI.

Today, we’re happy to announce RethinkDB 1.16 (Stand by Me). Download it now!

The 1.16 release is a precursor to the upcoming 2.0 release, and is the biggest RethinkDB release to date with over 300 enhancements. This release includes two exciting new features: a comprehensive API for large cluster management, and realtime push functionality that dramatically simplifies the development of realtime web apps.