Parallel Engineering Efforts

One of the most important things an organization can do as it grows out of startup-hood to maturity is to learn to run parallel engineering efforts. A parallel set of projects might implement multiple takes on an overall idea, testing out different approaches. Or it might implement the same idea at multiple points on a time/quality tradeoff continuum: a low-effort, easily delivered prototype, and a more fleshed-out version that takes longer to deliver.

NASDAQ CTO Summit 2016 Talk: Coding Time for Managers, Redux

On November 1st, 2016, I gave a talk at the CTO Summit series hosted by NASDAQ. It was a 20 minute talk, updating and expanding on a topic I’ve both blogged and written articles about – how important it is for engineering managers to keep their hands in the codebase they make decisions about. Here it is:  

Always Be Working With Customers

Last week I was in Israel for the MongoDBeer meetup and an enterprise event, both hosted by Matrix, one of our partners, and a few really great client meetings. One of the things that I don’t get to do often enough these days is work directly with customers on interesting technical challenges, so those client meetings were really quite invigorating. I was reminded of this recently when I was doing a fireside chat with Albert Wenger at NYCode, an event hosted by NextView Ventures.

DotScale 2016 Talk: The Case for Cross-Service Joins

Back on April 25th I spoke at dotScale in Paris; I gave a talk called “The Case for Cross-Service Joins,” as in queries that join data across multiple 3rd party services. For example, analytics over data that comes from both SalesForce and Googe Analytics. I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic, because MongoDB sits at the middle of a lot of apps that utilize 3rd-party services, and the benefits of building your app on top of such services comes at the cost of that data being siloed away, and difficult analyze it in a holistic way.

Refreshing My Client-Side JavaScript Chops

My overarching goal as CTO of MongoDB is to make building applications easier and easier. Given my day job, it’s actually been a little while since I did any work on the front end. Since we started MongoDB, client side javascript has really taken off. This pleases me, because our decision to make JavaScript a core part of the MongoDB experience was based on a view that JavaScript would continue to rise in capability and prominence.

Innovate vs. Appropriate

One theme I kept harping on at MongoDB World a few weeks ago was knowing when to innovate around new ideas and when to just reuse what already works well for products that have been successful. This comes up continuously at MongoDB, because having a good understanding of it is a significant competitive advantage. I attribute a large extent of MongoDB’s success to our unbending adherence to this discipline. When we started MongoDB, we had a clear goal - make data and databases easier for developers and operators, so that data and databases serve their users, not the other way around.

Backend as a Service: Security and Privacy

Almost all modern applications are composed of presentation layers, services executing business logic, and backing stores where the data resides. Developers could be more productive and agile if they could work more directly with the backing data without having to build specific APIs for every access type, but is quite a challenging problem. An emerging class of solution known as Backend as a Service (BaaS) has tried to address this problem over the last few years, but hasn’t become the norm yet.

CSNYC, The 2016 NYC CS Fair, and Bootstrap

Last Thursday (4/7/2016) I spoke at the 2016 NYC CS Fair. Their number one goal is to encourage public high school students who study CS to stick with it, by showcasing all the great opportunities that await them should they pursue a career there. I talked about being a hacker, how to negotiate CS studies in higher education, the difference between CS and software engineering, and the importance of a good mentor.

My Fireside Chat at Data Driven NYC

A couple of weeks ago I did a great fireside chat with Matt Turck at Data Driven NYC. I’ve always found that the fireside chat is a format with a lot of potential to be boring, but Matt is a great interviewer, and interacting with him on stage definitely adds to the event. For example, when I was talking about the headline features of our 3.2 release, I omitted a significant pair – the BI connector and Compass – and he reminded me to talk about them.

After Parse: Where Should MBaaS Go?

Last week I talked about Parse shutting down and how unfortunate that was, but also how outstanding a job they have done providing a transition path for their current users. MongoDB also published a very detailed post on how to migrate a Parse app onto MongoDB Cloud Manager and AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Since that day, the amount of activity on the open source Parse Server has been phenomenal, and many have suggested, as did one commenter on my last post, that this means it’s time for MongoDB and Parse to work even better together.