BashoChats 003 happened at BashoWest this past Tuesday. The crowd was standing-room only, and we were lucky enough to have Ryan Kennedy, Yammer’s Director of Core Services, talking about some of the impressive work that he and his colleagues are doing with Berkeley DB.

Here at Basho we want to make sure that your Riak implementations are set up from the beginning to succeed. While you can use the Riak Fast Track to quickly set up a 3-node dev/test environment, we recommend that all production deployments use a minimum of 5 nodes, ensuring you benefit from the architectural principles that underpin Riak’s availability, fault-tolerance and scaling properties.

If you’re running Riak and want to tell the world, we now have official Riak badges you can display proudly.

The Basho team will be attending the Erlang Factory conference in San Francisco this week, as well as hosting the afterparty on Thursday March, 29th. We hope to see you at Basho Bash West 2012!

Thomas Santero is joining Basho as Technical Evangelist. He’s based in Staten Island and will be focusing his time on bringing Riak to developers everywhere along the Eastern seaboard.

Ted Nyman is the lead engineer at Simple, a startup that is changing the way people bank. Ted was kind enough to come out to BashoChats last week in San Francisco to share his views on building scalable, JVM-based services that just work.

Peter Bailis is Graduate Student in the much-heralded Berkeley CS department. He and some colleagues have been working on something called Probabilistically Bounded Staleness for Practical Partial Quorums (PBS). In short, PBS aims to define just how eventual “eventual consistency” is, and their research produced some fascinating findings that should affect how people view and deploy distributed databases like Riak, Cassandra and Voldemort.

Riak Control is Basho’s new OSS, REST-driven, user-interface for their NoSQL database ‘Riak’. You can find more information on setting up RIak Control on the Basho Wiki.

The crowd funding site for the Travis CI Project went live this morning. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of working with it, Travis is a “distributed build system for the open source community” with support for Ruby, PHP, Clojure, Erlang, and JavaScript (with more on the way).

The videos from last month’s San Francisco Riak Meetup are online and ready for consumption. The first features Julio Capote giving a short overview of the work he and Posterous are doing with Riak as a post cache. The second presentation was from Mark Phillips and it was all about Riak Control, the new Admin Tool that will be fully supported in the forthcoming Riak 1.1 release.