Network, Build, and Learn at MongoDB.local Events — Now Free to Attend

William To
September 15, 2022
Photo of a panel discussion taking place at MongoDB .local London in 2021
Panel Discussion at MongoDB.local London, 2021

Every year, MongoDB hosts popular MongoDB.local events in major cities around the world. Packed with workshops, talks, and keynotes, these one-day, in-person gatherings bring together engineers, entrepreneurs, and executives from the surrounding area.

This year, for the first time, admission to MongoDB.local events is free. (Note that admission is granted on a first-come, first-served basis, limited only by seating capacity.)

Five upcoming events

Five MongoDB.local events are scheduled for the remainder of 2022, and you can register for the .local event near you through the links below or through the MongoDB.local hub page.

From sessions on the future of serverless to demos of next-generation technology, here’s what to expect at a MongoDB.local event near you.

Learn from the experts

Whether you attend keynote presentations or participate in customer discussions, you can tap into a wealth of knowledge from people and organizations that are thoroughly familiar with today’s technology landscape. You’ll learn from MongoDB experts, who will share hard-earned knowledge, practical solutions, and technical insight based on firsthand experience with common issues.

You can also attend talks from MongoDB customers, which are generally centered around a specific use case and solution — a sort of shared retrospective for the public. At .local Frankfurt, for example, an engineer from Bosch will discuss the company’s evolution from individual documents to time series data in an IoT environment.

All MongoDB.locals include sessions for a wide array of skill levels and specialities, such as a deep dive into the new Queryable Encryption feature or an introduction to building a basic application using Atlas Device Sync and React. These workshops offer practical, actionable advice that you can implement immediately upon returning to your office.

Expand your professional network

MongoDB.local events also offer many opportunities to expand your personal and professional network. In particular, these gatherings are a great way to connect with members of your local MongoDB User Group, who are likely working with the same technologies (or facing similar challenges) that you are.

Whether you’re searching for a new job or business opportunity, looking for tips and techniques to implement in your own environment, or just browsing for inspiration, you’ll likely find what you seek at MongoDB.local.

Explore the latest products

Product booths are another highlight of MongoDB.local events. Staffed by MongoDB product teams, these booths are where you can pick up limited edition stickers, discuss the latest developments with expert engineers, and see new MongoDB features in action.

Every event also features booths where third-party partners, vendors, and allies demonstrate cutting-edge technology, show how their platforms and services work in tandem with MongoDB, and answer any questions you may have.

Stop by these booths to explore the next big thing in data, see how MongoDB can provide new solutions for pressing problems, and come away with helpful, personalized advice for your own challenges.

Enjoy a one-of-a-kind experience

From Frankfurt’s Klassikstadt to London’s Tobacco Dock, MongoDB.locals are held at unique, memorable venues. Step inside refurbished historical sites, such as a former factory turned automobile museum or a shipping wharf converted into a top-tier event space.

In addition to a full day of talks and tutorials, attendees can enjoy breakfast, lunch, snacks, and drinks served at MongoDB.locals. Join us for a day packed with learning and networking opportunities in a venue near you.

Whether you’re a decision-maker or a developer, you’ll find something interesting, enlightening, or useful at MongoDB.local. Learn more about our upcoming MongoDB.local events in Frankfurt, San Francisco, Dallas, London, and Toronto, and register for your free ticket.

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Built With MongoDB: Vanta Automates Security and Compliance for Fast-Growing Businesses

Organizations pay a high price for running afoul of regulations. Several eight- and nine-figure fines have already been issued for GDPR violations in the four years since the far-reaching privacy regulation went into effect. Although the biggest fines are reserved for the biggest offenders, small businesses and startups, which can least afford financial and reputational setbacks, have no choice but to take compliance seriously. San Francisco-based startup Vanta knows what a challenge security and compliance can be for companies. Vanta co-founder Christina Cacioppo worked on Dropbox’s collaborative document project, Paper, when she and her team encountered resistance from the company’s legal team. From legal's perspective, the Paper project was jeopardizing compliance with Dropbox’s customer contracts. Cacioppo helped found Vanta to come up with a software solution to the compliance problem. Vanta helps companies scale security practices and automate compliance for the most prevalent data security and privacy regulatory frameworks, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR, and CCPA. The company's platform gives organizations the tools they need to automate up to 90% of the work required for security audits, and more than 1,500 customers have signed on since its founding in 2016. Vanta is part of the MongoDB for Startups program, which helps early-stage, high-growth startups build faster and scale further, and has used MongoDB as its database of record since its inception. Next-level security monitoring Vanta launched in the wake of several high-profile data breaches. Although the company's founders understood that online security was becoming more important, they also knew how hard it could be for fast-growing companies to invest the time and resources needed to build a security foundation. So, they set about building a platform that could withstand not just today's threats but tomorrow's as well. Robbie Ostrow, now engineering manager, was the first employee the company hired. "Historically, the way proving security worked was that a company would have an auditor look at its platform once a year and issue a piece of paper that says, 'you seem secure,'" Ostrow says. "We check all the same items that an auditor would check, but instead of checking 1% of it once a year, we check 100% once an hour." Ostrow acknowledges how helpful MongoDB Atlas has been in ensuring state-of-the-art security practices. "As a security company, one thing that's really important is ensuring that our data is separate from everybody else's data and that we are not accidentally exposing random ports to the internet," Ostrow says. "One awesome thing about MongoDB Atlas is a feature called VPC peering, which allows us to take our virtual private cloud (VPC) and communicate with our database cluster while not exposing any cruft to the world." Integration and scaling According to Ostrow, Vanta’s decision to use MongoDB from the start has been critical to its success. "We originally chose MongoDB because it was a perfect tool with which we could prototype,'' Ostrow says. "But we also found that it's a great tool for production systems. And we don't really believe in MVPs for the sake of MVPs because they eventually end up becoming production systems. So luckily we chose MongoDB, which helped us prototype really quickly because we didn't have to build tooling and migrate it to another system. And then it ended up being a tool that was able to scale with us." Once Vanta moved past an MVP, its growth was intricately tied to how fast it could integrate with other tools and build new features. "The key to the growth we've had is in the number of integrations we've been able to build and new features we've been able to add on top of those integrations," Ostrow says. "MongoDB has helped a lot to allow us to build and ship quickly without any downtime." Vanta software engineer, David Zhu, agrees. "MongoDB makes it easy for us to model our data and access it in ways that are very flexible," Zhu says. "As a security company, we're monitoring a lot of different resources, and our understanding of those resources changes over time." Flexible and familiar As a company that prizes the ability to iterate rapidly, Vanta finds great value in the flexibility of the document model that underpins MongoDB Atlas. "We have a really strict code base," Ostrow says, "but the flexibility of the data model allows us to move quickly while still feeling safe about the changes we're making." Getting the developer experience right is key to maximizing the productivity of a limited and costly resource. "Whenever we make changes or need to think about how we want to model our information," Zhu says, "MongoDB has the flexibility to let us make changes on the fly and speed up our development process." Drew Gregory, a software engineer at Vanta, also highlights the benefit of familiarity when developing in Atlas. "MongoDB's API abstractions tend to feel like JavaScript and JSON objects," Gregory says. "We really enjoy trying to make our entire stack feel and look like TypeScript. So MongoDB, cosmetically, aesthetically, and even programmatically, feels like working with JavaScript the whole way down." Zhu echoed a similar point: "Our technical stack is very straightforward. MongoDB slots right in. All of the data looks similar, and all engineers can work really easily across all aspects of our stack." That familiarity is important at Vanta because it helps with recruiting efforts. "One thing I like to tell people I'm recruiting is that Vanta tries to move fast and not break too many things,'' Ostrow said. "Because we're a startup, we need to grow incredibly quickly. But we're also a security company that our customers depend on. And we want to make sure that, while we're able to ship features really quickly, we're not going to violate customers' trust while we're doing so. Hiring people who are able to do this and ensuring that the tools you're using are able to scale are really important." To that end, Ostrow points out: "We're hiring quickly and looking for great new engineers. So get in touch if you're interested." A program for success MongoDB for Startups offers startups access to a wide range of resources, including free credits to our best-in-class developer data platform, MongoDB Atlas, personalized technical advice, co-marketing opportunities, and access to our robust developer community. Ostrow credits the MongoDB for Startups program for helping Vanta with its Atlas deployment. "MongoDB sent us a consultant who was able to help optimize the way we were using it and gave us a report with excellent advice across the board," Ostrow says. "We still refer to that report all the time." Are you part of a startup and interested in joining the MongoDB for Startups program? Apply now .

September 14, 2022
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Hanabi Technologies Uses MongoDB to Power AI Assistant, Hana

For all the hype surrounding generative AI, cynics tend to view the few real-world implementations as little more than “fancy chatbots.” But for Abhinav Aggarwal, CEO of Hanabi Technologies, the idea of a generative AI-powered bot that is more than just an assistant was intriguing. “I’d been using ChatGPT since it launched,” said Aggarwal. “That got me thinking: How could we make a chatbot that was like a team member?” And with that concept, Hana was born. The problem with bots “Most generative AI chatbots do not act like people; they wait for a command and give a response,” said Aggarwal. “We wanted to create a human-like chatbot that would proactively help people based on what they wanted—automating reminders, for example, or fetching time zones from your calendar to correctly schedule meetings.” Hanabi’s flagship product, Hana, is an AI assistant designed to enhance team collaboration within Google Chat, working in concert with Google Workspace and its suite of products. “Our target customers are smaller companies of between 10 and 50 people. At this size you’re not going to build your own agent from scratch,” he said. Hana integrates with Google APIs to deliver a human-like assistant that chimes in with helpful interventions, such as automatically setting reminders and making sure meetings are booked in the right time zone for each participant. “Hana is designed to bring AI to smaller companies and help them collaborate in a space where they are already working—Google Workspace,” Aggarwal explained. The MongoDB Atlas solution For Hana to act like a member of the team, Hanabi needed to process massive amounts of data to support advanced features like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for better information retrieval across Google Docs and many other sources. And with a rapidly growing user base of over 600 organizations and 17,000+ installs, Hanabi also required a secure, scalable, and high-performing data storage solution. MongoDB Atlas provided a flexible document model, built-in vector database, and scalable cloud-based infrastructure, freeing Hanabi engineers to build new features for Hana rather than focusing on rote tasks like data extract, transform, and load processes or manual scaling and provisioning. Now, MongoDB Atlas handles a variety of responsibilities: Scalability and security: MongoDB Atlas’s auto-scaling and automatic backup features have enabled Hanabi to seamlessly grow its user base without the need for manual database management. RAG: MongoDB Atlas plays a critical role in Hana’s RAG functionality. The platform enables Hanabi to split Google Docs into small sections, create embeddings, and store these sections in Atlas’s vector database. Development Processes: According to Aggarwal, MongoDB’s flexibility in managing changing schemas has been essential to the company’s fast-paced development cycle. Data Visualization: Using MongoDB Atlas Charts has enabled Hanabi to create comprehensive dashboards for real-time data visualization. This has helped the team track usage, set reminders, and optimize performance without needing to build a manual dashboard. Impact and results With MongoDB Atlas, Hanabi can successfully scale Hana to meet the demands of its rapidly expanding user base. The integration is also enabling Hana to offer powerful features like automatic interactions with customers, advanced information retrieval from Google Docs, and manually added memory snippets, making it an essential tool for teams around the world. Next steps Hanabi plans to continue integrating more tools into Hana while expanding its reach to personal Gmail users. The company is also rolling out a new automatic-interaction feature, further enhancing Hana’s ability to proactively assist users without direct commands. MongoDB Atlas remains a key component of Hanabi’s stack, alongside Google Kubernetes Engine, NestJS, and LangChain, enabling Hanabi to focus on innovating to improve the customer experience. Tech Stack MongoDB Atlas Google Kubernetes Engine NestJS LangChain Are you building AI apps? Join the MongoDB AI Innovators Program today! Successful participants gain access to free MongoDB Atlas credits, technical enablement, and invaluable connections within the broader AI ecosystem. If your company is interested in being featured, we’d love to hear from you. Connect with us at ai_adopters@mongodb.com.

November 21, 2024