We recently announced that MongoDB World, our annual user conference, will be held in New York City on June 1-2. We’ve opened a call for papers and we’re looking for members of the MongoDB community to share their experience and expertise with MongoDB at this event.
This year, our conference theme centers around scale the universe. What does that mean? We want to showcase applications across a variety of use cases -- from atomic data (CERN) to human-generated data (City of Chicago) to weather data (The Weather Channel) and everything in between -- and at all scales. We know that the MongoDB community is building applications never before possible, and MongoDB World presents an opportunity for you to tell your story.
Why Submit a Talk?
At MongoDB World, you get to showcase your expertise in front of hundreds of MongoDB users. It’s a great way to get feedback on your implementation from experienced MongoDB users, contributors and engineers. And there’s no better way to ensure that you understand a topic deeply than to teach and present on it.
The conference also provides an excellent networking opportunity. The people doing the most interesting things with MongoDB converge at this event, and as a presenter you secure your position as a thought leader among them. If your company needs to recruit, sharing the interesting work that your company is doing can help raise your profile among MongoDB talent.
Speakers get some great perks too, including a free pass to the event, discount codes for friends and colleagues, exclusive speaker swag, and access to a VIP speaker lounge.
How does MongoDB support speakers?
We work closely with presenters to ensure the success of each session. All presenters are paired with a MongoDB engineer “coach.” Presenters meet with their coach several times leading up to the event to review content and get feedback on the story and message. We also work with a public speaking coach who can provide feedback during dry runs.
If we select your talk, we’ll do everything we can to make you successful.
What are the tracks?
Like last year, we will be seeking submissions for the following tracks:
- Developer: Developers will share experiences building and designing modern applications using MongoDB. These technical sessions will explore application design patterns, indexing, geospatial queries, the aggregation framework, and other MongoDB features.
- Operations: Learn from large-scale production users on cluster design and management. Speakers will share deployment strategies, performance optimizations, hardware recommendations, and more from real-world experiences.
- Business: MongoDB customers reveal how they use MongoDB to improve customer experience, accelerate time to market and lower total cost of ownership.
- Ecosystem: MongoDB’s network of technology, cloud, and services partners will show you how to make MongoDB even more powerful and productive.
In addition to the above, MongoDB engineers will be presenting in two additional tracks:
- Internals:Hear directly from MongoDB engineers on how the server and drivers work “under the hood.”
- Prototype to Production: We’ll present reference architectures across our core use cases, such as Internet of Things and Mobile.
Who attends the conference?
It helps to understand your audience at a macro level. As you can see from the attendance breakdown of last year’s event, we had a strong showing from software developers and architects. There was a smaller but strong contingent of operations professionals, and attendees at the executive level.
Which Talks Succeed?
If you’re thinking about submitting a talk, you may be curious to learn what makes a great session. To help guide your submissions, we’d like to share some insight into last year’s event.
We used Guidebook App as our mobile agenda for the conference. Room monitors in every room encouraged attendees to rate talks using a simple survey within the app, which included a rating (1-5) for the content and presentation style, as well as a free-form text field for comments. The data below reflects information that we gathered from the app.
We hosted 80+ sessions at MongoDB World last year. We received overwhelmingly positive feedback on the presenters and the content. But there were a few standout sessions. Below are the top 8 sessions by score, which represents the top 10% of talks at the conference.
- Diagnostics and Debugging - Asya Kamsky
- Building Real Time Systems on MongoDB Using the Oplog at Stripe - Evan Broder
- MongoDB at Mailbox - David Barshow
- MongoDB for Time Series Data Part 2: Analyzing Time Series Data Using the Aggregation Framework and Hadoop - Bryan Reneiro
- Building a Scalable and Modern Infrastructure at CARFAX -- Jai Hirsch
- Black Box MongoDB: Running MongoDB at Scale at Parse -- Charity Majors
- How Appboy’s Marketing Automation for Apps Platform Grew 40x on the ObjectRocket MongoDB Platform -- Jon Hyman and Kenny Gorman
- The Weather of the Century Part 2: High Performance -- Andre Spiegel
What made these talks so special?
From my observation as one of the event leads and the point person on content, there were a few common threads across each of these presentations.
- Insight: Each of the presenters had subject matter expertise and had gained unique insight into MongoDB. Evan’s use case for the oplog at Stripe, Charity’s knowledge on running systems at scale at Parse, David’s experience growing Mailbox, Jai’s perspective on modernizing CARFAX -- each provided attendees with new insights into building and managing applications with MongoDB.
- Story: Who would have guessed that a topic like diagnostics would be so highly rated? Inherently, it seems pretty dry. But Asya took her subject matter expertise (which is vast) and built a story around the subject. She used the metaphor of acting as a detective looking for the bottleneck in the database. She told stories of customers and how she had helped debug them. It was an educational and fun session, and the highest rated of the conference.
- Preparation: We work closely with the presenters, both the MongoDB employees and the community members, to make their talks a success. The top presenters took this process seriously. They submitted slides early for review and feedback. They ran through the talk multiple times before the session. They rehearsed with our public speaking coach. And the efforts really showed.
What’s the Next Step?
The