April 2021 Summaries

Buffer is a social media software that enables small businesses and content creators to plan, publish, and analyze marketing campaigns across social channels. The company has over $21M annual recurring revenue and serves 67,536 customers across over 85 countries. Buffer's CTO, Dan Farrelly, joined the company in February 2014 when it was a much smaller team of about 15 people. At that time, Buffer was an entirely remote team with incredible transparency both inside and outside the organization. The culture and lean engineering approach resonated with MongoDB's products, which enabled Buffer to practice continuous delivery of applications and scale easily. Dan Farrelly had previously taken a MongoDB University course in 2012 and gained experience by putting out fires at Buffer early on. He advises engineers who want to grow into CTO positions to broaden their perspective, build relationships across the organization, and think strategically about how code drives business metrics.

The Difference Between R and D` discusses the distinct mindsets required of researchers versus developers in a technology company, with a focus on innovation and disruption. Researchers are encouraged to pursue theoretical ideas with longer time horizons, whereas developers focus on commercially viable products or features within a shorter timeframe. The article highlights the challenges of funding basic research and measuring its ROI, but also emphasizes the importance of long-term thinking and embracing uncertainty in order to drive disruptive innovation.

This blog post discusses how Infosys Data Model Converter, a solution developed by Infosys, can help enterprises accelerate their data modernization journey by simplifying the schema design process for MongoDB. The converter processes source relational schema and signals to provide target MongoDB schema suggestions, reducing the effort typically spent in schema design by 50-60%. It offers key features such as boosting productivity, saving time, comprehensively analyzing RDBMS entity relations and data patterns, applying rich rules to generate a fully compliant NoSQL target state data model, offering flexibility for organization-specific customizations, and connecting and deploying the model to the target MongoDB platform with sample data. The converter is available as part of Infosys Modernization Suite and can help enterprises create a strategic database that empowers their entire company.

The MongoDB Atlas Operator for Kubernetes allows users to manage all their MongoDB Atlas clusters without leaving Kubernetes, providing a seamless workflow for managing cloud-native applications. The trial version of the operator has core functionality to provision fully-managed Atlas clusters and creates Kubernetes Secrets for sensitive data management. It also enables IP Bindings for secure access to clusters. To get started with the Atlas Operator, users need to register/login to Atlas, create API keys, deploy the operator, and create necessary custom resources such as projects, clusters, and database users. The operator will automatically create a Secret containing connection information to connect to the Atlas Cluster, allowing users to mount it into their application Pod for secure access.

Gryphon Online Safety`, a cloud-managed network protection platform, was formed by John Wu and Arup Bhattacharya in response to their concerns about online safety for children. The company uses `MongoDB Atlas` as its database solution, which provides scalability, automated backup solutions, and easy integration with JavaScript and Node.js runtime. With $5.4 million in seed funding and over 30,000 customers, Gryphon has seen significant growth during the COVID-19 pandemic, as families have spent more time online and parents are looking for security measures to protect their children. The company's product is not cyclical, with upgrades happening throughout the year, and its solution provides an easy way for parents to control their children's online experience. Gryphon's CTO and Co-founder Arup Bhattacharya advises that a company should start by identifying how its product will make a positive impact on people's lives and that perseverance is key during difficult times.

Three college friends, Siya Raj Purohit, Chaitanya Varanasi, and Sohail Shaikh, met while attending the University of Texas at Austin as undergraduate students. Five years after graduating, they found themselves brought together again by MongoDB. The three friends have maintained their friendship despite divergent career paths, with each joining the company in different capacities - Siya as an engineering professional, Chaitanya as a Senior Solutions Architect, and Sohail as a Solutions Architect for the South Central region. They attribute their sustained friendship to regular communication through a private Slack channel and shared experiences at MongoDB's onboarding week, which provided them with exposure to various aspects of the company's culture and executives. The friends are excited about working together in person once it is safer to do so, exploring New York City as a team, and contributing to the growth of the business.