MongoNYC 2013 is on Friday, 6/21, and I’m really looking forward to it. This is our 4th conference in New York City, and we’re expecting over a thousand attendees.

I’m delivering two talks one on Data Safety, and another on Full Text Search, which we added in 2.4. I’ll also be presenting the MongoDB Roadmap at the end of the day, during which I’ll both preview the short-term aims of the upcoming 2.6 release, and discuss how we think about the roadmap for the next few years.

While presenting is all well and good, that’s not what I enjoy most about our conferences. What I love most about our conferences are the opportunities to listen to our users. As I said in my last post, I’m obsessed with being in tune with the MongoDB community. The questions and harangues I get are a part of that process, only much more immediate than what I get out of reading tickets.

At MongoSF in May, for example, I had a couple of conversations with an engineer, whose name I sadly cannot remember, about his MongoDB use cases and needs. He is using MongoDB in a number of applications, none of which need to scale. This led a discussion of our general policy of not including features that don’t scale. From here, we quickly were able to go back to some first principles, and come up with some feature concepts that both scale and meet his requirements. I find this sort of iterative interaction very hard over email or chat, but highly effective in person.

Another thing I enjoy are whiteboard sessions, where I can focus on interaction with users’ real-world issues. There, I can get that two-way-handshake interaction with someone that confirms for me that I’ve successfully explained something to them, and hopefully helped them with a problem. So if you want to discuss a feature (current or future), or have a question you need answered, please come and spend some time with me (or another engineer) in one of the whiteboard sessions.

And lastly, I must say that another thing that I’m looking forward to is the enthusiasm of the increasingly mature MongoDB community. There is nothing like being in a room with a thousand people all interested in learning and talking about the project you’ve been thinking about daily for almost six years.