MongoDB Champion of the Month is Luke Thompson

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We’re excited to spotlight @Luke_Thompson as our MongoDB Champion of the Month :glowing_star:

Luke Thompson is currently working as a Chief Architect at Clarifresh. He is a passionate coder building software by day and by night. He specializes in cloud solutions and enjoys working with teams to build serverless microservices APIs in AWS, alongside Java-based services for heavier-weight requirements. He is the organizer of the Sydney Java Meetup and is exploring the world of building communities of enthusiastic and welcoming peers. He has published articles such as Exploring MongoT (Atlas Search) and Java Faceted Full-Text Search API Using MongoDB Atlas Search, etc.

We asked him some questions about his journey, so read through to learn more about the icon that he is :backhand_index_pointing_down:

Tell us about your path to becoming a MongoDB Champion.

I started building solutions with MongoDB over 10 years ago, with early versions which were way before Atlas, before the WiredTiger storage engine, when the database used an MMAP memory model. It was just a plucky open source database project with an awesome set of characteristics. The document model immediately made sense to me, and as a Java programmer with an object model I was previously ‘mapping’ to SQL Server tables, I totally fell in love with it. It was intuitive, natural, and had great performance. It reduced the communication barriers between operations (DBAs) and developers, simplified changes, and put the schema in one place rather than two. I also love writing and language, and have found over the years that trying to articulate what I have learned whilst building code was a great way to organize my own thoughts, force me to learn it thoroughly, and to share. It was through writing blog articles and giving some talks at the MongoDB and Java meetups here in Sydney that I was invited to participate in championing MongoDB in this great community.

You’ve been a MongoDB Champion for some time now. What drives you to continue helping the community?

For a long time, I was quite an indoor-coder. I was a bit socially anxious, but I felt like I needed to expand my horizons to keep growing and learning more than I could in my own little world. So I started a user group for Java with a couple of friends, and have been organizing that ever since. I’ve found it very challenging, but also extremely rewarding to get out and engage with other coders who are also passionate about the things I am passionate about. I get really excited about technology that solves problems, performs well, and has an elegance to it. This weekend I’ve been playing with different ways of bundling computer vision models in an AWS Lambda, which was really fun, and I couldn’t wait to share it with my colleagues this morning. I find MongoDB very interesting, and recently have had a renewed interest since the inclusion of the excellent Java project Lucene into MongoDB in the form of MongoDB Atlas. I’ve been digging into the source code of the MongoT (Atlas Search) Java engine, which combines Lucene with a ChangeStreams-driven index sync process and an aggregate stage → Lucene query translator. I think the main motivation for me is to connect with passionate and interesting people and learn from them. And to have people to share with when I have built something I’m excited about.

Can you share one impactful moment you’ve had as a Champion so far?

Being part of the MongoDB Champions program has allowed me to meet some awesome developers from all over the world. Getting to go to the London .local event last year was definitely the highlight. I’ve also really enjoyed participating in early previews of features and hopefully contributing something back to the team at MongoDB too.

If you could share one piece of advice to people in tech, what would that be?

It’s a bit of a scary time in tech right now, with AI changing our world and our tools as coders. I think the best advice I’ve heard recently from some great coders was to remember that nothing fundamental has changed. We still need all the same engineering skills we did before to produce reliable, repeatable, high-performing, scalable, and awesome software. We might type less code, but we need to pay no less attention, and take no less care, in creating amazing new things.

Where can developers connect with or learn more about you?

Thank you very much, Luke, for sharing your story with us today and for all the incredible work you’ve done for the MongoDB community. We can’t wait to see what you share next in the community.

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