MongoDB University Expands Education Outreach With New Partnerships

Steve Jurczak
June 14, 2023

MongoDB is paving the way for the future of development and looking to bridge the software development skills gap through partnerships with leading online learning platforms. New partnerships with LinkedIn Learning and Coursera will make MongoDB University content widely available to new learners. And, to enable traditionally underrepresented groups to advance their skills with MongoDB, we're providing free certifications to developers through Women Who Code, MyTechDev, and Lesbians Who Tech & Allies. The new partnerships are part of the MongoDB for Academia program, which gives educators access to free MongoDB Atlas credits and certifications. We're also excited to announce new online learning courses to teach database administrators and SQL professionals the power of non-relational database technologies.

Supply, demand, and closing the skills gap

Today's tech industry faces immense demand for software engineers to create new applications, and choosing the right database technology is essential for success. It establishes the backbone and influences the speed of building, deploying, and updating an application. These newly announced initiatives will make it easier than ever for developers to quickly learn how to leverage MongoDB and use it to build and deploy successful applications within high-demand industries across the globe — rapidly closing the gap on the current software engineer shortage.

MongoDB for Academia will provide educators and students with the opportunity to hone their database development skills for free. The initiative offers more than $400,000 of MongoDB Atlas credits, free certification, access to free curriculum resources, and the GitHub Student Developer Pack, giving students around the world the opportunity to enter the workforce with relevant certifications and skills.

With the addition of MongoDB University developer courses on LinkedIn Learning, millions of people across the globe have access to an expansive range of software development skills. Offering courses in Introduction to MongoDB as well as Java, Python, C#, and Node.js, these courses have been bundled into Learning Paths, creating the perfect platform for students aiming to pass MongoDB's Associate Developer certification. This partnership between MongoDB University and LinkedIn provides a chance to upskill the knowledge base of existing and aspiring software developers. Last year, 446 million skills were added to LinkedIn profiles.

By joining forces with Coursera, MongoDB University is taking its Introduction to MongoDB course to a new level. The course will now be available to 124 million global learners through the Coursera platform. Upon completion, learners will receive an electronic and physical certificate to add to their education portfolio. With this new partnership, learners will have access to official educational materials actively developed and maintained by MongoDB experts.

For experienced SQL professionals looking to expand their skills, MongoDB University is rolling out a new online learning path: MongoDB for SQL Professionals. With this course, students will gain the knowledge and expertise they need to tackle complex non-relational databases and develop powerful, innovative applications. Since refreshing MongoDB University last November, more than 50,000 developers have taken advantage of the free, ungated courses per month with more than 600 individuals becoming certified professionals.

Normalizing diversity

MongoDB is proud to also be partnering with leading diversity and inclusion advocacy groups to make software development a more welcoming profession for underrepresented groups. Through the new partnership with Women Who Code, MongoDB seeks to certify 100 members by the end of 2023. Women Who Code is an international non-profit organization that provides programming assistance to women pursuing technology careers. MongoDB University is also partnering with Lesbians Who Tech & Allies to certify 100 members beginning in October 2023. Lesbians Who Tech & Allies is a community of LGBTQ women, non-binary, and transgender individuals in and around tech. Finally, by partnering with MyTechDev, a non-profit organization focused on empowering African students, MongoDB hopes to provide practical coding skills and specialization pathways in enterprise technologies. The initiative seeks to certify 500 people in Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, and Egypt over the next two years.

These exciting new partnerships are all part of our mission to empower innovators to create, transform, and disrupt industries by unleashing the power of software and data. To start learning with MongoDB University, visit learn.mongodb.com.

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New Online Archive with Performance Improvements and Enhanced Metrics

We are excited to announce several new features coming to Atlas Online Archive. With these improvements, customers will observe higher performance, be able to choose which region hosts their archival data, and have greater insight into the data stored in the archive through improved metrics. New storage engine We have optimized Online Archive through the introduction of a new storage engine that captures metadata during archival to power faster query performance. The new underlying storage service minimizes the overall data scan when querying the Online Archive. Additionally, the new storage engine delivers additional benefits in the form of storage optimizations like sorting as well as ongoing rebalancing to deliver consistent performance over time. With this feature, you will experience faster Online Archive querying performance while your overall costs are decreased when querying against the archives. Ability to choose a storage region With the new Online Archives, the users will be able to select the storage region at the time of creating an Online Archive. There will be a feature to choose one of the supported Data Federation regions from the dropdown during the creation process. In addition, we display the closest region so the users can make an informed decision about their storage region. Enhanced metrics With these new enhanced and improved metrics, we are helping customers better understand what data is in their archive such that they can connect to the appropriate endpoint for their use case and have insight into the performance of archival jobs. With these enhanced metrics, users can see a dashboard including the total # of documents in the archive and overall Archive data size (with a tooltip to explain metrics), what rate are archival jobs archiving, Min/Max Date Fields in the archive, and other statistics that are helpful and important for the users to increase the visibility of the archives. Newly created archives Note that only the newly created Online Archives on or after 06/07/2023 will see the performance improvements and enhancements initially. All existing archives created before 06/07/2023 will continue to function as-is (without the new improvements and enhanced metrics). Over the coming year, we will migrate all existing archives created before 06/07/2023 to the new backend storage service. See the documentation for additional information about creating new Online Archives and Enhanced Metrics .

June 13, 2023

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The Developers' Developers: Two Australian Developers Share Their Connections to Customers

The world’s 28 million software developers are writing the foundations of our future, propelling innovation for their organizations through lines of code by creating game-changing new apps. Indeed, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that between 2022 and 2032, the number of software developers, quality assurance analysts, and testers will grow 24%, “much faster than the average for all occupations.” Fueling this innovative workforce is another group of developers, the people working behind the scenes to build the tools, technologies and platforms that other developers need to be successful: the developers’ developers. Many developers at MongoDB—which after all was built by developers for developers, and is beloved by enterprises and startups alike—fall into this camp. To learn more about what makes these developers tick, we talked with two Australia-based senior software engineers at MongoDB who love to code for their peers. For Lavender Chan and Angus Lee, there’s nothing like seeing the ripple effect of the code they have been working on and the impact it has on their customers. What’s more, the opportunity to be a “developer’s developer” has allowed Chan and Lee to find a space for deep technical work while thriving in an autonomous environment. At MongoDB we believe developers will build the future. First, can you share more about your roles and what you’re working on? Lavender Chan (LC): I work on the Relational Migrator tool, which allows developers to migrate SQL data onto MongoDB. I joined the company two and a half years ago, and have been part of the Sydney technology scene for the last 10 years. The appeal of joining MongoDB was that it’s a large global company, but in the engineering team you are able to have a big impact and a lot of autonomy. Relational Migrator was a greenfield project, and our team has been able to take the original product idea built out of the US and run with it. I’m a full stack developer and have touched on every feature of the tool. A lot of the engineers were able to contribute and work on new ideas. There’s also a strong emphasis on culture here which practically means a lot of the people I work with are excited to be here and passionate about their roles. Angus Lee (AL): I work in the MongoDB Charts team in Australia and think our team is a sweet spot for developers. I’ve interned for other tech companies and started my career at MongoDB. Since then I’ve been given responsibilities where I can create a lot of impact. My role at MongoDB in Sydney has also given me great opportunities to connect directly to the developers we are creating products for in a way that pushes my work to a higher level. Your roles are focused on products targeted to other developers. How does developing for developers affect your approach to your work? LC: In our roles we are creating directly for other developers, so the work that I am doing is deeply technical and specific. As Migrator is a newer product, we are able to interact directly with our customers—other developers—and often a lot of their questions are quite complex and specific, which means I go on a learning journey in debunking and fixing their problems. AL: We have a strong team culture in that as developers we want to be our own users. That means we want to use other MongoDB team products, and they use ours, so we can better identify pain points and issues for our customers. There’s a term that developers use called “dogfooding” that really sums up how we think on this, which basically means to use your own product. It means for me that I think about writing clean code to help any other developers extend on this, and how effective what I do will be for the user. What I’ve also learnt is how our product helps other products thrive. We should have done all the hard work to transform data and show it through data visualizsation tools so it’s easy for the customer. Can you tell us more about this connection to customers and how MongoDB empowers developers? LC: When Relational Migrator was released as a general product, I went to MongoDB World to work at the booth, and I talked to the developers and customers using the platform. As an engineer, it was an amazing experience and opportunity to see how it was being used and what else we could be doing. This connection of engineers with customers, as well as the ability to speak to them regularly in my role, is unique. In other companies I would need to go through support teams, to go through someone else just to push out a bug fix. Our team is very customer focused, so we can prioritizse features that our customers want. AL: One of the best moments for me at MongoDB was when I went to MongoDB World and I sat down with a customer to talk through a feature of Charts. It was a pivotal moment to see the improvements it makes for the businesses that use it, and the impact it generates for their customers beyond that. I could sit back and see the ripple effect of the code I’m writing. There is also a great feedback engine where our users can submit ideas and other users can vote for that feature. The product managers pick from these and push out features that are directly relevant to the developers using it. Where we really connect is in our aim to create an open forum for developers and customers to provide feedback and suggest ideas. Developers are problem solvers. As part of the MongoDB Love Your Developers campaign, we believe in championing the voice of developers and giving them the freedom to experiment and innovate. How do you see this in action? LC: In other places I was a small cog in a massive system. At MongoDB, I really have an impact, and can see directly how my work translates to our final product. In Sydney, we’re a satellite office, but it’s indicative of our company culture that there is huge trust placed in these teams. We’re given high impact projects and can run with them, which means I’ve been able to watch the Relational Migrator product go from a tiny product used by only a few customers, to one that is now generally available. Not many engineers get to work for a well-established,large company and still have the opportunity to work on and release products like a startup. There is a strong global interest in AI-driven innovations. How have your connections to customers led to innovations in this area? AL: We’ve been able to take an idea for a new AI feature, Natural Language Charts , and take it from concept to being released as a feature at MongoDB.local in London. We could see from our conversations with customers, as well as broader industry trends, that there was strong interest in new AI features so we were able to prioritizse it for Charts. We started with nothing and were given the freedom to research how this feature could work using AI, create a new proof of concept, and from there we were able to push it out into a feature which was a really proud moment. Having this agility and flexibility to prioritize something new is exactly what we want to provide to our customers. I never feel like I'm just churning out code. We are connected to the work and to our customers. MongoDB is built by developers, for developers. Become part of the team changing the way the world works with data!

May 9, 2024