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Just over two years ago, I embarked upon a journey as a developer / evangelist for a company who was then called 10gen (who got fed up of saying “the MongoDB people”, and transformed into MongoDB Inc). My goals for this role were: to learn what it was like working for a company that produced a technology product; to discover what impact working in an open source fashion has; and to level up my advocacy skills.

TL;DR MongoDB London, 6th November, 50% off with discount code 50Trisha.

This year I’ve been giving an evolving live demonstration of coding a Fully Buzz Word Compliant, mobile-friendly web application. The aim of the demo is to show, via a real-world application rather than snippets or a toy example, where these popular technologies sit in your architecture, and how they interact with each other.

This year I’ve been demonstrating how easy it is to create modern web apps using AngularJS, Java and MongoDB. I also use Groovy during this demo to do the sorts of things Groovy is really good at - writing descriptive tests, and creating scripts. Due to the time pressures in the demo, I never really get a chance to go into the details of the script I use, so the aim of this long-overdue blog post is to go over this Groovy script in a bit more detail.

We’ve been missing an introduction to using MongoDB from Java for a little while now - there’s plenty of information in the documentation, but we were lacking a step-by-step guide to getting started as a Java developer.

I sought to rectify this with a couple of blog posts for the MongoDB official blog: the first, an introduction to using MongoDB from Java, including a non-comprehensive list of some of the libraries you can use; the second, an introductory guide to simple CRUD operations using the Java driver:

YOW recorded me, yet again, talking about the adventure that is the design of the new Java Driver for MongoDB. This is the same talk I gave at GeeCON and DevoxxUK, with some updates based on our Journey So Far. In it, I cover the architecture of the new driver and some of our current thoughts around where we want the API to go.

While I was at QCon London, I was grabbed for an interview with InfoQ. It’s always a pleasure to be interviewed by Charles, I think he brings out the best in me. You can see the video here. At the start of the interview we refer to the first time we met, which, if you’re interested, you can also watch.

Last night the Sevilla MUG had our March Madness event. This was our largest event yet, with 36 people signed up. Although the aim of March Madness is to have a MongoDB Engineer at all the user groups this month, that’s not such a big deal for us as I live here, so this was also the first event where I wasn’t the main attraction - [Javier] (https://twitter.com/JvrBaena) gave a really great talk about the lessons learnt at SocialBro after using MongoDB in production for the last couple of years.

Last night was the inaugural meeting of the Sevilla MongoDN User Group. An event organised with just over 48 hours notice, in a city where I don’t speak the language and where even my best-connected contacts aren’t sure they’re fully plugged in to the tech scene.

I wrote an article for the latest edition of Java Magazine which is an introduction to MongoDB for Java developers, and a nod to why it’s good in the “Big Data” space. Look inside >MongoDB and Big Data

In previous years, JAX London would have been an easy, local conference to go to. This time it took me most of Sunday to get there, and not because of the Super Storm. Still, that gave me the day to finish off the tutorial I was running there on Monday morning. Not that I would be so unprofessional as to leave preparing things until the last minute, oh no….

Brief guide to running the MongoDB tutorial from QCon London and JAX London.

Information related to the currently-ongoing effort to redesign the Java driver for MongoDB.

The second in my short series of blogs about the new Java driver is now available for your perusal. In it, there’s some guidance on how to get started using the new driver, whether you want to use the new (unfinished) API, the existing “classic” API, or a blend of both.

Yesterday Stephen Chin, one of Oracle’s Java Evangelists and the JavaOne content chair, interviewed me via a live stream about JavaOne, the new MongoDB Java driver, and my plans to Change The World.

I feel slightly like a traitor to my own blog, as I’ve written a blog post for Somewhere Else. I’ve written about the design goals for the 3.0 MongoDB Java Driver in the official MongoDB blog (seems sensible, right?). I’m not sure how I feel about cross-posting the entire contents, so I’m just linking you to them instead. Anyone who’s been to my Backwards Compatibility presentation this year might notice something familiar about the content.

So, like one of my presentations, I have a question for you. Actually, I have more than one question for you. I’m not going to bother with survey monkey or whatever, I want to share the answers so please, answers in the comments: Are you using the Java driver for MongoDB in your application?Are you using the Java driver directly, or are you using a third party library like Morphia, Spring Data, the Scala driver, your own abstraction layer, etc?

Last Tuesday I went to a London Java Community talk which promised to debunk the hype around NoSQL. Whether you’re already bought into a NoSQL technology, or you’re just wondering what all the noise is about, it’s worth an hour out of your day to see Akmal Chaudhri’s comprehensive summary of the technologies out there.

Don’t you hate it when you ask a perfectly good question, and someone comes back with the answer “it depends”?

It’s so frustrating to think that in a world of ones and zeros, people can’t give absolute answers and you can’t rely on “best practice”.

Hot on the heels of my very first MongoDB webinar, I was… encouraged… to do another. Here at 10gen we’ve been running a series of webinars around using MongoDB in the financial services domain. Yesterday was the last in the series, and was presented in association with C24 - John Davies, their CTO, did most of the talking, and demonstrated their product for automatically turning financial messages from one format into another.

Yesterday I had the nerve-wracking dubious alarming great pleasure of presenting my first official MongoDB-shaped talk. This was in the form of a webinar, which is an interesting and different format.

Devoxx 2012 from Roy van Rijn on Vimeo.

Devoxx topped off a crazy two months of conferences. I’ve heard people talk about the conference season in the past, and been slightly (OK, very) jealous of all that jet-setting. I’ll admit, however, to a slight feeling of relief that my focus until Christmas is pretty much going to be coding. I hope.

So, I’ve finished my first full week in the new job and I’ve learnt lots of new stuff. Which is great, because that’s usually why you change jobs.