Skip to main content

A review of Trisha Gee from 10gen does an unconference

Image
By

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

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

By
I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...
Post a Comment
Read more

Remember to Delegate: The Triangle of Trust

By
So you think you can lead a team? I’ve been talking and writing a lot about leading a software engineering team in 2025. I started thinking about it more deeply the year before when I decided to give a colleague, who was moving into team leading, some advice: 'Doing the work' isn't the only way to add value Remember to delegate Pick your battles Talk to your team every day Out of this came a talk, “So you think you can lead a team?” which I gave at work, at meetups and at conferences in various different formats during the first quarter of 2025. Here I am looking at Remember to Delegate and an idea which came out of discussion around the talk, The Triangle of Trust, in more detail. Delegate Delegation is a crucial skill for any team lead, yet it is often one of the most challenging aspects of leadership to master. Many leaders, particularly those who have risen through the ranks as individual contributors, struggle to let go of tasks, fearing a loss of control or a dip in ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

By
I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th...
22 comments
Read more