ANZ Pied Piper

This is not the first time we discuss NoSQL databases in this blog. In previous posts we have seen how NoSQL databases differ from traditional SQL databases. NoSQL is a growing market forecasted to reach $5 billion this year and within that category MongoDB is the most popular and successful database. According to the latest rankings MongoDB is the 5th database most popular overall just trailing PostgreSQL and 3x more popular than other famous NoSQL databases like Redis, Cassandra and ElasticSearch. The MongoDB company itself had a successful IPO in October 2017 During our team project we decided to use MongoDB because it has a rich query language that allowed us to implement the functionality we were looking for. MongoDB stores BSON (Binary JSON) documents. This is what they look like: MongoDB is open source and its architecture allows it to scale horizontally in a load balanced fashion by adding more servers to reach very high performance. It also supports indexing for fa...

The enablement portion of the program is behind us. Now it's time to have fun! As we saw in previous posts, all program participants acquired various skills through a series of workshops and competed against each other by creating a project of their own involving elements from all workshops. The next step was to have a 24 hour Hackathon. Hackathons are events where participants prototype a concept about a common theme, either working individually or in teams. Between illness and various working and internal training commitments only 9 people could join us but it was fun. The theme we chose for the Hackathon was to improve the app I had developed for the previous year's Presales Conference. The idea of the original app was twofold: to help us navigate the event and choose between as many as 4 parallel tracks to help us obtain better feedback about the different sessions as they happen, as opposed to rely on a survey at the end of the 3 day event. Additionally th...