On November 1st, 2016, I gave a talk at the CTO Summit series hosted by NASDAQ. It was a 20 minute talk, updating and expanding on a topic I’ve both blogged and written articles about – how important it is for engineering managers to keep their hands in the codebase they make decisions about. Here it is:

Last week I was in Israel for the MongoDBeer meetup and an enterprise event, both hosted by Matrix, one of our partners, and a few really great client meetings. One of the things that I don’t get to do often enough these days is work directly with customers on interesting technical challenges, so those client meetings were really quite invigorating.

I was reminded of this recently when I was doing a fireside chat with Albert Wenger at NYCode, an event hosted by NextView Ventures. We were talking about some of the things we did early on at MongoDB that led to the great momentum we now have. Albert said that a major factor was how obsessed I was with making our users successful with their deployments. That’s true, I was completely obsessed. I had this thing about all the questions on our google group being answered as fast as possible. Day or night, if someone had a problem, I was trying to fix it with them.

Back on April 25th I spoke at dotScale in Paris; I gave a talk called “The Case for Cross-Service Joins,” as in queries that join data across multiple 3rd party services. For example, analytics over data that comes from both SalesForce and Googe Analytics. I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic, because MongoDB sits at the middle of a lot of apps that utilize 3rd-party services, and the benefits of building your app on top of such services comes at the cost of that data being siloed away, and difficult analyze it in a holistic way. My thinking on this topic continues to evolve, and I’ll be writing more about that, as well.

A couple of weeks ago I did a great fireside chat with Matt Turck at Data Driven NYC.

I’ve always found that the fireside chat is a format with a lot of potential to be boring, but Matt is a great interviewer, and interacting with him on stage definitely adds to the event. For example, when I was talking about the headline features of our 3.2 release, I omitted a significant pair – the BI connector and Compass – and he reminded me to talk about them. It’s things like that which enhance the experience for the audience. At their best, a fireside chat interviewer takes care of the setup, makes sure you’re staying on track, and grabs opportunities to dig deeper.

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.

Since this is a technical crowd, the talk will be highly technical, and since it’s an AWS event, I’ll be emphasising MongoDB’s uses in the AWS environment. Here’s the abstract:

On November 6th, I’ll be delivering the keynote address at MongoDB London 2014. I’ll be talking about the upcoming 2.8 release, the future of storage engines in MongoDB, and Automation. Since our last conference (MongoDB Boston 2014), the revamped MMS with Automation has gone from soft launch to wide release, and the response from the MongoDB community has been fantastic. We’re seeing tons of adoption and getting lots of great feedback. We’ve also been hosting meetups in our offices, to demonstrate how easy it is to use Automation to deploy a MongoDB infrastructure at any scale.

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.