2025 William Zola Award for Community Excellence Recipients

Arek Borucki and Kai Yong Lai (Vandyck) have been honored with the 2025 William Zola Award for Community Excellence by MongoDB, recognizing their significant contributions to the community. Arek, a long-standing member, has been instrumental in providing technical knowledge and mentorship, founding the Munich MongoDB User Group, and authoring books on MongoDB. His role as a Machine Learning Platform & Database Engineer at Hugging Face involves managing MongoDB infrastructure to support ML workloads. Vandyck, a relatively new yet impactful community leader, founded the Kuala Lumpur MongoDB User Group and initiated monthly workshops that enhance skills among participants. As a full-stack engineer, he emphasizes the role of MongoDB in product development and values community engagement for its collaborative spirit. Both recipients reflect on the importance of community involvement in advancing personal growth and technical expertise, highlighting MongoDB's role in supporting developers with flexible, scalable platforms and resources like MongoDB University.