MongoDB World 2019
New York Hilton Midtown
New York, New York, USA
Giant curly braces at the entrance. The decor at the event was heavy into curly braces and retro video game graphics and was a lot of fun.
Giant curly braces at the entrance. The decor at the event was heavy into curly braces and retro video game graphics and was a lot of fun.
Jon Clucas
June 17, 2019
In the weeks leading up to MongoDB World, Rhonda Jacobson, Greg Steinbruner and Charles Lee from the MongoDB team went through several iterations of my presentation with me, which was invaluable in framing and shaping the narrative. During these pre-event video sessions, I started considering switching our API layer from Girder to MongoDB Stitch.
MongoDB World 2019 was held June 17 ‒ 19 at the New York Hilton Midtown. MongoDB has their own blog with Live Blog posts of each of the three days (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3) and an official recap. Here is my recap of the event from my perspective.
The biggest news for me was that MongoDB 4.2 includes client side field level encryption, which was a high priority for us to figure out how to do for MindLogger. Now all we have to do is activate the native feature in our database.
Another exciting new feature is generally available, embeddable MongoDB Charts. Until we beef up our own data presentation interfaces, these iframes will allow us to quickly have working visualization prototypes across all of our MindLogger apps.
Day 1
June 17
I enjoyed Nuri Halperin’s aquatically themed “Understanding ACID Transactions Play By Play”, Ella Shuravetsky’s “A Journey to Magical Security Creatures’ Land”, Pavi Vetriselvan & Samy Lanka’s Game of Thrones themed “Prepare Yourselves: Sharded Transactions Are Coming” and Melissa Plunkett’s “Terraform New Worlds on MongoDB Atlas” before being pleasantly surprised at the quality of vegetarian options at lunch, including a cajun quinoa dish.
Right after lunch I learned some MongoDB techniques in Yulia Genkina’s “Just-in-time Validation with JSON Schema”. I was taken aback at how similar the narrative of Krystal Flores’ “Searching for a Better Me: How Simple Habit Uses $text Search to Help Users Stress Less, Achieve More, & Live Better” was to the talk I planned to give first thing the next morning. Lauren Shaefer’s “Look Ma, No Servers! Serverless Application Development with MongoDB Stitch” and Drew DiPalma’s “Securing Application Data from Day One” increased my inclination to migrate from Girder.
Day 2
June 18
I started the morning presenting “MindLogger: A Digital Platform for Shareable Access-Controlled Ecological Data Collection and Storage in MongoDB Atlas” and spent over an hour afterward in follow-up discussions, particularly with Marty Quinn, a data presentation specialist who attended the talk.
The morning keynotes mostly covered exciting updates in MongoDB 4.2. After lunch, I dug in to some of these new features with Kevin Albertson’s “Using Client Side Encryption in MongoDB 4.2 Link” and Ken White’s “New Encryption Capabilities in MongoDB 4.2: A Deep Dive into Protecting Sensitive Workloads”.
Imanuel Portalatin (who attended my talk and spoke with me briefly afterward)’s “Turkeys vs. Swans: Building Antifragile IT Systems for Disaster Response” was one of my favorite presentations of the event, both in terms of content and presentation.
The afternoon keynotes were more narrative focused than the morning sessions, and then the day ended with a happy hour.
Day 3
June 19
The final day was a rapid-fire series of interactive presentations and challenges, digging into technical techniques and purely fun tasks like Chris Grabosky’s “Prop Building ― Ghostbusters, Raspberry Pi, & Arduino”.
Overall
Every talk I attended felt worth my time. The quantity and quality of swag (including a teeshirt, a sweatshirt, four pairs of socks, and a scrunchie) were impressive. The food was good. The event was informative, enjoyable and exhausting!