Highlights From MongoDB World 2022, Day 2

Day Two of MongoDB World 2022 was all about the breakout sessions — more than 80 were on tap for the day.

Things kicked off shortly after 8 a.m. with a discussion on empowering women and other underrepresented groups in the workplace, held in the IDEA Lounge. The 9 a.m. slot was packed with 10 sessions that ranged from building a sustainable ecosystem to the principles of data modeling to using Rust to build applications.

Steve Westgarth, senior director of engineering at GSK (formerly GlaxoSmithKline) dove into the weighty topic of morality in the digital world and what developers ought to do when the software they build leads to unintended consequences. All too often, there’s immense pressure to release MVPs early — before all potential vulnerabilities have been vetted. Westgarth’s session sprang from a rhetorical question: “Do we as engineers have an ethical and moral responsibility to anticipate unintended consequences and how much personal responsibility should an individual take to ensure ethical management of data?” His discussion answered that with a Yes — developers do have to weigh the risk of unintended consequences, such as data breaches, versus the desire to maximize market opportunity. Westgarth urged developers to ask themselves what the unintended consequences are of the software they have in production, and to raise awareness of these issues in their organizations.

A 15-minute lightning talk followed, with a session name that made it a popular draw for fans of worst-case scenarios: “Strange Cases From the Field.” Adam Schwartz, MongoDB director of technical services in EMEA, walked attendees through some especially challenging real-life technical support stories. He gave a detailed account of such curious cases as The Mistaken Hypotheses and The Unsuccessful Mitigations, and shared lessons he learned during years in the trenches as a support specialist. Closing on a positive note, he assured attendees that problem cases are rare, most cases have straightforward solutions, and exceptional cases are always a learning experience.

Day One saw Mark Porter announce the MongoDB Relational Migrator, including a live demo of the product. On Day Two, lead product manager Tom Hollander did a deep dive into use cases, justifications, and future capabilities for the tool. MongoDB Relational Migrator imports and analyzes relational database schemas, maps them to an appropriate MongoDB schema, and transforms and migrates the data into MongoDB. Hollander said organizations can experience a 3x to 5x increase in development velocity and up to 70% in cost reductions by migrating away from relational models in favor of a more modern deployment such as MongoDB Atlas. Hollander said he anticipates future capabilities to include continuous replication, Kafka integration, application code generation, schema recommendations, and more.

One company thriving in its legacy modernization efforts is Vodafone. The global head of engineering and transformation, Felipe Canedo, described Vodafone’s transition from a traditional telecommunications company to a Telco-as-a-Service (TaaS) provider. At the core of this transition was the creation of a scalable and open platform for the company’s engineers to innovate with complete freedom and flexibility. Canedo said Vodafone chose MongoDB because of its security, cloud-native high availability, support for multi-region and multi-cloud deployments, agile delivery, professional services, and ease of integration. The ultimate goal, Canedo said, was to provide Vodafone engineers with the best software experience possible.

Day One also saw MongoDB CPO Sahir Azam announce the general availability of MongoDB Atlas serverless instances. On Day Two, MongoDB advisory solutions architect Carlos Castro gave a live demo of deploying a serverless database. In 15 minutes, starting from the Atlas dashboard, Castro took the audience step-by-step through the process of selecting a cloud provider, spinning up the instance, creating an app service, authentication, and users, and then setting up rules to allow users to access data on the instance. Serverless instances always run the latest version of Atlas, include always-on security, and enable customers to only pay for operations they run.

Day Two also featured several discussions with leading experts and MongoDB partners. MongoDB senior vice president, product management, Andrew Davidson hosted a panel with three leaders in the effort to close the Developer Experience Gap: Peggy Rayzis, senior director of developer experience for Apollo GraphQL; Lee Robinson, director of developer relations for Vercel; and Søren Bramer Schmidt, chief architect and founder for Prisma.

Rayzis cited Apollo’s supergraph as one way it's helping developers be more productive by unlocking their flow state. “When you’re in that flow state, you’re writing better code, making better decisions, and developing better value for consumers,” she said.

Schmidt pointed out how the newest generation of developers stand to benefit the most from the proliferation of developer tools. “New generations of developers are much bigger and we can invest in better tooling for them,” Schmidt said. “It’s an exciting time to be building tools for developers.”

Lee emphasized the important role the open source community plays in these tools. “People hear about Vercel through Next.js,” Lee said, “and we invest to give back to the open source community.”

As gratifying and fun the first two days of World were, we really have something special in store for Day Three. It kicks off with a final keynote address by best-selling author, pioneering inventor, and futurist Ray Kurzweil.

Day Three also features our Builder’s Fest, where even MongoDB CTO Mark Porter is expected to lend his considerable expertise to a few promising projects. With live game shows, chaos presentations, nerd battles and more, MongoDB World 2022 will finish on a high note.

Check back tomorrow for more highlights from MongoDB World 2022.