PowerToFly Event Recap: MongoDB’s Regional Sales Director Offers 10 Valuable Career Lessons

In November 2020, MongoDB hosted a virtual panel discussion with our partner PowerToFly. During this session, women in roles across MongoDB’s Sales organization — from entry-level to leadership — shared more about their experience working at such a fast-growing company, how they’ve owned their career growth, and advice for anyone considering a career here.

Photo of Stephanie Samuels

One mic-drop moment during the event was when Stephanie Samuels, Regional Director of Sales at MongoDB, shared 10 unique and insightful lessons based on her experiences that anyone — early careerist or seasoned professional — should consider to guide their career success.

10 Career Lessons by Stephanie Samuels

Lesson #10: You are not a label.

Lesson #9: Have a strong work ethic.

Lesson #8: Advocate for yourself.

Lesson #7: You are not an imposter.

Lesson #6: The most valuable resource you have is your time.

Lesson #5: Make work-life balance a priority.

Lesson #4: Create a personal board of directors.

Lesson #3: Run your own race.

Lesson #2: Have perseverance.

Lesson #1: There will be beauty for ashes.


Download the lessons here:

10 Lessons to remember as you build your career

About PowerToFly:

MongoDB is a proud partner of PowerToFly, a recruiting platform that connects companies to women in tech, sales, marketing, and more. With a mission to improve diversity recruiting and hiring, PowerToFly is a targeted job board that offers high-visibility employer branding services to help pools of underrepresented talent discover new roles at great companies. Learn more about PowerToFly here.

Interested in pursuing a career at MongoDB? We have several open roles on our teams across the globe, and we’d love for you to build your career with us!

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How Accenture’s Data Modernizer Tool Accelerates the Modernizing of Legacy and Mainframe Apps to MongoDB

As companies scale their MongoDB estates and apply them to more and more use cases, opportunities for deeper insights arise—but first come issues around data modeling. The Challenge It’s one thing to start modeling for a green field application where you have the ability to apply modeling patterns . But it’s a different matter entirely to start from an existing relational estate and take into account multiple data sources and their business requirements in an effort to create the ideal MongoDB data model based on explicit schema (table and relations) as well as implicit schema (access patterns and queries). Unfortunately, this is a fairly common obstacle. Perhaps an application has been around for a while and documentation hasn’t kept up with changes. Or maybe a company has lost talent and expertise in some areas of a monolithic app. These are just a couple of examples that demonstrate how time consuming and error-prone this effort can be. The Solution MongoDB and Accenture are excited to announce a modernization tool which enables faster MongoDB adoption by accelerating data modeling. As part of its mainframe offload and cloud modernization initiatives, Accenture’s Java-based data modernizer helps companies arrive at a recommended MongoDB document data model more quickly and efficiently. Using this tool results in a faster operational data layer for offloading mainframes and faster implementation of MongoDB Atlas for migrating applications to the cloud while also transforming them. Accenture and MongoDB are long-standing strategic partners, and this investment is another addition to our joint customers’ toolkits. “This modernizer is the right tool for teams who are focused on changing business requirements as they rethink their applications for the cloud. With on average 50% faster data modeling and 80% data model accuracy straight out of the tool, developers can work on modernizing instead of spending weeks figuring out the right data model to simply meet existing business requirements that have not been explicit.” (Francesco De Cassai) How it Works The modernizer analyzes access logs and relational schema from Oracle and DB2 databases, whether they’re powered by mainframes or not. This allows teams to obtain critical insights before kicking off development activities, thereby better informing the process. Additionally, the modernizer combines the implementation of modeling patterns , development best practices such as document sizing (best, average, worst case), and naming conventions, while also providing confidence levels to predict the accuracy of the model it’s suggested. The tool combines Accenture’s deep expertise and lessons learned from numerous successful projects. Our customers are investing in a new approach to managing data: Data as a Service & Data Decoupling. This strategic initiative focuses on consolidating and organizing enterprise data in one place, most often on the cloud, and then making it available to serve digital projects across the enterprise. MongoDB Atlas unlocks data from legacy systems to drive new applications and digital systems, without the need to disrupt existing backends as companies modernize and migrate to the cloud. With this tool and MongoDB capabilities, MongoDB and Accenture allow organizations to get the most out of their data. Find out more about the MongoDB & Accenture partnership here . Learn more about MongoDB’s Modernization Initiative .

January 21, 2021
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Empower Modern App Developers with Document Databases

Across industries, business success depends on a company’s ability to deliver new digital experiences through software. The speed at which a company can develop and deploy a new application with innovative features is a direct lever on business outcomes. Given the vital role developers play in the success of your business, it stands to reason that equipping them with the tools to maximize their productivity is in your best interest. Unfortunately, many organizations are unaware of the tax they’re placing on their development teams by using a relational database. While the relational database has been a bedrock for data-driven applications for 50 years, it was developed in an era before the internet and is a poor fit as the foundation of today’s web and mobile applications. Document databases, which have emerged over the past decade, have cemented themselves as the most popular and widely used alternative to the tabular model found in traditional relational databases. Document databases have become so powerful that even relational databases are trying to emulate them. Built around JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)–like documents, document databases are intuitive for developers to use. Instead of the rigid row-and-column structure of the relational model, document databases map documents directly to objects in code, which is how coders naturally think of and work with data. Let’s break down the key advantages to document databases in building modern applications. We’ll see why the document model’s flexibility eliminates the complex intergroup dependencies that have traditionally slowed developers down. The limitations of the relational database model Relational databases add complexity to a developer’s workload, severely hampering the velocity of work. The rigid row-and-column structure creates a mismatch between the way developers think of code and data, and how they need to store it. Additionally, while the relational model was fine in an age when most applications used a small pre-set of attributes such as last names, ZIP codes, and state abbreviations, the majority of data collected by organizations today is rich in structure. We have given names and sometimes preferred names. We have unique attributes that are relevant to only some of us: For example, people with PhDs have dissertation topics, sports lovers have favorite sports, and our families come in every conceivable shape and size. This richly structured data reflects how we actually think about the real world, and it’s very difficult to flatten, store, analyze, or query using rows and columns. With relational databases, developers can feel stuck in quicksand with changes to their applications requiring them to carefully collaborate with experts like database administrators (DBAs) who help them translate their schemas and queries to underlying relational data models to ensure that indexing strategies are appropriately employed. The layer of indirection increases cognitive load, is hard to reason about, and slows everything down. More than half of application changes require database schema modifications. Those database modifications take longer to complete than the application changes they are designed to support. You can quickly see why these complicated efforts severely slow the delivery of new software features into production. Enabling development of modern apps with document databases With the birth of the internet and the proliferation of mobile and web apps, developers’ roles evolved. The emergence of robust development frameworks, which abstracted away underlying complexity, and the rise of DevOps led organizations to consolidate developer functions. The new generation of full-stack developers wanted databases that better addressed their applications’ requirements and their ways of working with data. The founders of MongoDB recognized a need for a modern database solution while at the adtech giant DoubleClick in 2007. They still were unable to scale to the 400,000 transactions per second the business required due to the constraints of the relational model. These challenges inspired them to create a new, modern, general-purpose database. This database could address the shortcomings of the relational data model and offer a solution that developers actually wanted to use. The result was a horizontally scalable, document-based NoSQL database called MongoDB. The document database model in general, and MongoDB more specifically, addresses the limitations of relational databases in several notable ways: Intuitive data model: The documents at the center of document databases have a universal data format. JSON is a lightweight, language-independent, and human-readable format that has become a widely used standard for storing and exchanging data. These documents map directly to data structures in popular programming languages so there is no need for the additional mapping layer often used with relational databases. Because data that is accessed together is stored together, there is less code to write; developers don’t need to decompose data across tables or run joins. Flexible schema: These JSON-like documents are flexible. Each document can have its own fields, and there’s no need to pre-define the schema in the database. It can be modified at any time. That flexibility enhances developer agility. Meeting user expectations while simplifying application architectures The most innovative applications we use in our daily lives — think Netflix and Instagram — have raised user expectations for what every application should be. Today we expect applications to be: Highly responsive Able to deliver relevant information Optimized for mobile devices Secure Powered by real-time insights Continuously improved Meeting those expectations can be extremely challenging, especially for developers using relational databases. A typical data infrastructure built around a legacy relational database can trap your development team in overly complex and siloed architectures. Document databases, on the other hand, can simplify application architectures. Documents are a superset of all other data models, so developers can store and work with a variety of data types. Development teams can accommodate most of their use cases in a single data model and database The document data model can help your developers overcome the limitations of the relational model while improving their productivity and velocity. Allowing them to minimize the undifferentiated work of maintaining their infrastructure and to focus on meeting demanding user expectations. As a result, they can deliver better, more innovative applications faster than before. Click here to read the original article published on The New Stack.

June 5, 2023