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A review of Trisha Gee from 10gen does an unconference

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Last night was the second East Anglia MongoDB User Group meeting. We were once again extremely lucky to have someone from 10gen, the MongoDB company. Trisha Gee took some time out of her extremely busy schedule to pop up to Norwich for the evening for a general chat about MongoDB. I have never been to an event, let alone organised an event where I haven’t been pretty sure what the content was going to be beforehand. When Trisha suggested doing an unconfernece and responding primarily to questions from the audience I thought it was a great idea, but was a little apprehensive.

Trisha was absolutely sensational! There were slides, of course. These were on MongoDB document structure and scheme design. They were rushed through at almost lightning speed, but so clearly that everyone followed them precisely. I found it extremely refreshing to find a speaker who moved at a fast pace. Lot’s of discussion followed the slides and continued afterwards in the bar.

There were only 11 members of the group at the meeting and I think this is more reflective of the actual level of interest in the Norwich area. I don’t think we’ll see 30 people at an MongoDB event very often. I’ll be planning the next event very soon and I’m intending to have a few members of the group speak about their MongoDB or NoSQL projects.

Comments

  1. Sky11 April 2013 at 10:29

    Hey Paul,

    I thought I would post my meetup comments here too for completeness:

    The whole purpose of a technical meetup is to learn and network. I did both last night.

    Trisha presented document modelling with MongoDB at a fast but extremely effective pace. It kept our attention, without presuming too much or too little.

    Having someone to ask questions too, who works full time with the development of the software, can allow you to get lightbulb moment answers, and that's exactly what Trisha offered. By having the opportunity to ask about my concerns of embedded arrays within a document, Trisha suggested moving that array information out, and model each item as a document in a collection.

    This answer suddenly enlightened me to how MongoDB should be used. I implemented the modifications in less than an hour after the event and feel some shackles have been released :)

    The other meeters were extremely social and all showed a passion.

    A thoroughly influential meetup

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