The Women and Trans Coders at MongoDB

Happy International Women’s Day from the Women and Trans Coders at MongoDB! The WTC group is a network of women-identifying engineers at MongoDB. We exist as mentors and a resource for each other, and also aim to help diversity flourish. We’d like to share a few of the more exciting goings-on in our group over the past few years.

What We Do

One of the first things we did as a group was to begin facilitating large-scale discussions about diversity at the company. These discussions serve as a casual and welcoming forum for all voices to come together and talk about our culture. We learn so much during these conversations, and they help us focus on specific diversity-oriented goals for our group for the future. Most recently, we talked in depth about allyship and the discussion sparked initiatives across the company, including an allyship talk with the Ada Initiative’s Valerie Aurora.

We’re also focused on mentoring and providing resources for younger generations of female engineers. Many of us can recall specific women who inspired us to join or stay in engineering, and we want to ensure that our interns find those role models during their time at MongoDB. We run a program with our female engineering interns in which we focus on career development, engineering advice, and general mentorship. We also give tech talks at university and college women’s CS groups and attend hackathons and other university events.

Finally, we work to create spaces for women in tech outside of MongoDB to come together. Last year, we hosted a lounge at the MongoDB World conference, featuring lightning talks by female MongoDB engineers, round-table discussions, and networking and social events. We were happy to learn that the conference attendees found this space helpful, and particularly enjoyed getting to meet and work with so many other female engineers.

What’s next

We’re now in the midst of planning a lounge and talks for this summer’s MongoDB World 2016 conference. We’re thrilled to announce that MongoDB is offering scholarships to female innovators to attend the conference, and we encourage you to apply. If you’ll be at World, be sure to stop by!

Nominate a female innovator today.
Submit a nomination
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Nominate a Female Innovator to Attend MongoDB World

We can’t wait until this year’s MongoDB World, and are working hard behind the scenes. We want to make sure our biggest event is a fun-filled learning experience, and that attendees reflect our diverse community. As part of our commitment to changing the gender ratio in technology, we're excited to launch the Female Innovators at MongoDB World initiative . Submit a nomination Award Nominees will be notified of their nomination by April 15, 2016. The first 50 nominees to register will receive complimentary admission to MongoDB World , June 28-29 in NYC. At the event they’ll be able to: Network with other female innovators through sessions and activities at the Women Who Code Lounge Meet the engineers behind the technology Learn best practices to amp up their skills, and the inside scoop on who’s doing what with MongoDB Explore community activities, including the Leaf Lounge, poster sessions, and our famous after party Fill out the short nomination form to invite a woman who works or aspires to work in tech to attend our global conference. You can also nominate yourself! Make sure to act fast, a limited amount of tickets are available. Deadline The deadline to submit a nomination is Friday, April 8. Eligible nominees will be notified of their acceptance status by April 15. Eligibility Nominees must be 18 years old or older, and must identify as a female. Open to new participants of MongoDB World only. Can you nominate yourself? Absolutely! Nominees will be notified of their nomination by April 15, 2016. The first 50 nominees to register will receive complimentary admission to MongoDB World, June 28-29 in NYC. View terms and conditions . Submit a nomination today .

March 7, 2016
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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