Employees Recognized for Work Outside of MongoDB

An organization's success can often be attributed to its people, because it’s people who dedicate their time to helping a company achieve goals and be recognized as an industry leader. We find it’s even more of an achievement when our people are recognized for the work they do outside of MongoDB.

Two passionate members of the MongoDB Engineering organization were acknowledged by separate notable organizations for their independent work.

Dr. Michael Cahill is the Vice President of Engineering (Storage). Based out of our Sydney office, Michael leads the global Storage team which is responsible for concurrency control and crash recovery. Optimizations in the storage layer can have a huge impact on making customer workloads more efficient.

Michael was recently recognized as a winner of the Test of Time Award at the annual SIGMOD conference for his work on a new algorithm for implementing serializable isolation. SIGMOD is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Management of Data, which specializes in large-scale data management problems and databases. The conference is considered one of the most important database conferences in the world. Researchers and engineers working on database technology come together to present their work, and new innovations are often published first at SIGMOD.

“Serializable Isolation is the gold standard for databases: it means that applications using the database can reason as if transactions run one at a time. There is never any interference between concurrent transactions and each transaction takes the database from one consistent state to another. My contribution was to use database internals, including hooks in code for multi-version reads and an extension of intent locks, to detect potential anomalies at runtime and make executions safe regardless of the application logic.

“I’m both proud and humbled to receive the Test of Time Award this year. While I’m proud of the work we did and the impact it has had, I am humbled to see my name listed beside some of the greats of the field who blazed the trail before me.”

The main implication of Michael’s work is that there is now a way to build databases that provide serializable isolation with only a modest change to existing systems.

A. Jesse Jiryu Davis is a staff engineer at MongoDB on the Drivers Team. He leads development on the C and C++ drivers and is the author and maintainer of Motor, an async Python driver. He also pitches in on PyMongo development and oversees the design and specifications process for a lot of new MongoDB driver features. He spends time mentoring new coders and speaking at conferences.

Jesse is a member of the Python Software Foundation, which manages the Python language and the community of Python programmers, and sponsors dozens of Python conferences.

“When I joined about 7 years ago their main mission was to promote the use of Python, and they won: Python is perhaps the most popular language. Now I see the PSF devoting much more effort to expanding computer science access to poor countries and marginalized groups, using Python as a vehicle. For example, the most recent PSF grants were to girls' education events in Brazil and Cameroon.”

Jesse was recognized by the Python Software Foundation for his community service work, including his work on their blog, and his involvement with the NYC conference PyGotham.

“I was awarded for two responsibilities I've really enjoyed. My work on the PSF blog gives me an excuse to interview some of the smartest and most accomplished people I know. The second part of the award, for my work on the PyGotham conference, was mainly in recognition of my speaker-coaching program: I thought it would be helpful for first-time speakers to have professional coaching, so I raised enough money to hire my own speaking coach to spend an hour with each of them. This year we're repeating that program for PyGotham speakers and expanding it to the PyOhio conference, too. Speaking at conferences transformed my career, and I want to make sure that everyone has the same opportunity I did to learn public speaking, particularly members of groups underrepresented in tech.”

We could not be more proud of both Michael and Jesse for their recognitions. It is a true testament to the level of talent at MongoDB, and the passion of the people behind the product.

To learn more about MongoDB people and culture, click here.