Updated 2/3/2015 to reflect the publication of MongoDB’s migration guide. I was sad to hear about Parse shutting down last week. Parse made a big push towards serverless architectures, which I think is a great goal. Serverless architectures are the ultimate in letting developers focus on making great products for their users and letting other people make the plumbing work. In the early days of web and mobile application development, backends were a thing that every team had to write themselves from scratch.

For the past 6 months, I’ve been participating in the NYC Tech Talent Pipeline Advisory Board, a partnership between New York City and technology companies in New York. From the press release announcing this board’s formation: Mayor Bill de Blasio today announced 14 initial industry commitments to support the delivery of technology education, training, and job opportunities to thousands of New Yorkers as part of the Administration’s NYC Tech Talent Pipeline initiative.

When we first published a mongodb.org homepage, we sloppily described MongoDB as “schema free”. That description over-emphasizes the baggage MongoDB left behind, at the expense of true clarity. At the time, however, document databases were brand new, and it was simple to describe them in terms of what they were not (witness the prevalence of the terms “non-relational” and “nosql”). This over-simplification was much more than an oversight. As you can see by reviewing this old blog post, it reflects an immaturity in our thinking.

Partial indexes allow you to create an index that only includes documents in a collection that conform to a filter expression. These indexes can be much smaller, cutting down index overhead in storage space and update time, and by matching against the filter criteria, queries can use this slimmed-down index and run much faster. This is one of the new lightweight “schema where you need it” features we’re bringing to MongoDB in 3.

On August 25th I will be delivering a talk at the AWS Pop-Up Loft in NYC. The talk is entitled: “Behind the Scenes with MongoDB: Lessons from the CTO and Cofounder on Deploying MongoDB with AWS.” The AWS lofts combine hack days, talk series, bootcamps, and “ask an architect” opportunities, and mainly target engineers working on startup projects that are built on AWS, although other people do attend the talks.

The aggregation framework is one my favorite tools in MongoDB. Its a clean way to take a set of data and run it through a pipeline of steps to modify, analyze, and process data. At MongoDB World, one of the features we talked about that is coming in MongoDB 3.2 is $lookup. $lookup is an aggregation stage that lets you run a query on a different collection and put the results into a document in your pipeline.

A lot of people I talk to are unsure about the Apple Watch, and the category in general. Me, I’m counting down the days till I get my Apple Watch. In fact, at this point my impatience is so great, the prospect of having to wait another month to get one almost makes me want to go out and buy a Pebble. So, score one for the Apple marketing team, I guess.

As discussed in other posts, I spend a lot of time in email, and much of the email I get is related to MongoDB’s Jira. I’ve written before about my Jira summarizer, which maintains a single message in your inbox with a summary of recent activity in projects you watch. In my continuing quest to make Jira email easier to deal with, I wrote a tool to make it easier to quickly assess the email notifications about individual issues.

Last week I went to Las Vegas for MongoDB’s sales kickoff. The night before I left, Sunday, I came down with a decently high fever. I got a bit nervous, as it came on strong and fast, but I took some Advil, went to bed, and the next morning felt ok to get on a plane. That whole Monday was pretty good with the help of some more Advil. On Tuesday morning the Advil was giving ground, on Tuesday evening it was in full retreat, and Wednesday at 5am I found a helpful MongoDB employee in the hotel to take me to the ER.

MongoDB 3.0 has landed. The development cycle for 3.0 has been the most eventful of my entire career. As originally planned, it would have been great, but still incremental in nature. Instead, we wound up acquiring our first company, integrating their next-gen storage engine, and by capitalizing on that unlooked-for opportunity, delivering a release so beyond its original conception that we revved its version number. Renaming a release in-flight is out of the ordinary, so I wrote about our reasoning when we announced the change.