Tokern

I had written a post on data catalogs in the newsletter(https://dbadminnews.substack.com/). Today the read counter rolled over 100 reads after 2 weeks.

Other than the number, there is another reason why this is a big deal. I did not advertise the news letter directly other than a twitter post when I published the article.

I added a link to the newsletter on my website (https://tokern.io).
I mentioned the open source projects at (https://github.com/tokern/) in multiple comments in appropriate posts on HackerNews and Reddit. Users went through multiple hoops -> Github Project -> Tokern Website -> Newsletter to find the articles. This shows that the users are engaged to make multiple micro-commitments on these topics.

The icing on the cake is that a couple of these also subscribed to the newsletter.

I wrote my second post in news letter on data catalogs (https://dbadminnews.substack.com/p/data-catalog) and I shared it to my network as well as on Twitter and specific forums in Reddit.
I got very good feedback on the quality and relevance of the topic. I also got my first subscriber I do not know. Huge deal and motivation to keep going with the news letter.

I started a news letter on the technology behind data governance, privacy and security. I've done a lot of research in this area as part of bootstrapping Tokern. The news letter seems like a good medium to share my findings. The website also has a blog but it doesnt have as much reach as substack.
Also the value of the news letter has independent value. So I created a landing page and started a news letter using substack. Please check it out and give me feedback.

Landing Page: https://dbadmin.news/
News letter: https://dbadminnews.substack.com/

I released my 3rd open source project called Bastion under the Tokern banner. Bastion is a database firewall for production databases in the cloud. Security teams can use it to manage access to production databases for operations and engineering teams.
Github: https://github.com/tokern/bastion
Landing Page: https://tokern.io/bastion

I released a new project to help manage permissions in AWS Lake Formation. AWS customers use AWS products to manage a data lake for business intelligence and machine learning.
AWS Lake Formation helps manage permissions. Since this is a relatively new product, it is cumbersome to use.
I created a SQL interface to AWS Lake Formation to provide a familiar interface similar to other databases.
Shared on Reddit but still too niche for the sub-reddits.

The website was already on GatsbyJS. I revamped the website to change the copy on the landing page. I also added products and a blog.
Two main goals are:

• Provide concrete information to prospects on what the company and products do.
• Start building content for SEO

I created the first open source project. The idea was based on discussions with my network. Developers make copy of tables in databases and cloud storage.
Security teams do not know where the sensitive data is. PiiCatcher searches databases, files and cloud and lists all the places where it found sensitive data.
I announced it on reddit, twitter and linkedin. Got a few likes and stars on Github.
Link: https://github.com/tokern/piicatcher