LiveScribe vs. Phone Camera Update: the NOOP edition

In my first post on this topic, I said I’d post an update in a week or so. Ok, so that was about 7 weeks ago. I abandoned the trial of both of these techniques because 2.8.0 is, frankly, more important than my experiments in productivity. I’m going to get back to it, but this is actually an opportunity to say something important about getting derailed from productivity projects by urgent items.

MongoDB 2.8.0-rc0

Today our team made public our first release candidate of MongoDB 2.8, rc0. Since June, beginning with MongoDB World 2014, I’ve been speaking publicly about MongoDB 2.8, and its headline features: document level locking and pluggable storage engines. What I haven’t said until now is just how related these two features are. We’ve been working on our storage API for roughly a year, and with MongoDB 2.8 rc0, we’re rolling out the first fully supported and working storage engine integration: WiredTiger.

MongoDB London 2014

On November 6th, I’ll be delivering the keynote address at MongoDB London 2014. I’ll be talking about the upcoming 2.8 release, the future of storage engines in MongoDB, and Automation. Since our last conference (MongoDB Boston 2014), the revamped MMS with Automation has gone from soft launch to wide release, and the response from the MongoDB community has been fantastic. We’re seeing tons of adoption and getting lots of great feedback.

The Road To MMS Automation

“MongoDB is as easy to operate at scale as it is to develop with.” From the very beginning of MongoDB, I’ve envisioned making that bold claim. Until today, it’s been a dream. We just brought it firmly into the realm of the realistic. Today we rolled out a completely revamped MMS built atop Automation, our cloud service for deploying and running MongoDB. Automation works with any infrastructure, from AWS to private cloud to bare metal.

LiveScribe vs. Phone Camera

I’ve been using this new toy. Well, it’s for work, but until the novelty wears off, it’s definitely also a toy. I like taking notes in meetings on paper as much as possible. It’s less distracting, and more friendly. I’ve tried various ways of doing this, but nothing has stuck yet. The closest has been a regular notebook. The biggest problem is that I don’t like carrying things to and from work, or to different places.

The Staff Meeting

Everyone with a staff knows they need a staff meeting on a recurring basis, often weekly. And those who don’t have staff are themselves in other people’s staff meetings, making it one of the most common meeting types for anyone to attend. Sadly, there is often ambiguity around what they are for, making them annoying and inefficient. What I Want out of Staff Meetings The purpose of these meetings is twofold: 1) status updates, and 2) key decision making or the precursor conversations for decision making.

MongoDB 2.6 and the Future

MongoDB 2.6 has been released. For my thoughts on many of the features of the release, please see my blog post on mongodb.org. Beyond the features, this release means a lot to me. In five years, we’ve gone from four people trying to figure out if a document database was a viable concept, to the fifth most popular database in the world. MongoDB 2.4 and all previous releases proved that the document model can transform how modern applications are developed and deployed.

Debugging the Boss: The Martyr

Like The Superhero, The Martyr does their team’s work to make up for not managing. However, whereas The Superhero insists on hogging all the interesting work, The Martyr does work that no-one wants to do. When a deadline is looming and things are looking down, they will pull all nighters to finish it themselves rather than do what a manager should do, such as motivating their team, or fixing the deadline.

Debugging the Boss: The Superhero

Like The Martyr, The Superhero does their team’s work to make up for not managing. They are super smart, super capable, and they can often do most or all of the jobs that their reports do better than their reports. They also care deeply about the quality of the product their team works on. Unfortunately, they are not inclined to delegate any of the interesting work, because they want it all for themselves.

Debugging the Boss: The Politician

The Politician’s main concern is making their bosses and peers think they are doing a great job, and are responsible for every success they can claim, regardless of reality. They are cousin to the Glory Hog, but are far less destructive than them, because their goal is to create a successful environment for themselves. Also, their behavior is driven by confidence, not under-confidence. They are not threatened by their reports’ accomplishments, because they intend to take credit for them.