Yesterday I had the privilege of presenting the very first session for vJUG, a new virtual Java User Group that allows us to span geographies when sharing talks and stories. I'm really interested in the vJUG idea, especially now I'm not in London - if we can find good ways to share knowledge without having to travel, that will help us reach people who don't normally go to conferences or don't have a local user group to go to. Not to mention cutting travel costs and saving the environment.
Webinar: Processing High Volume Data Feeds with MongoDB
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.
Update 14 Dec 2020: Sadly it looks like the video is no longer available, but the slides are
Webinar: Processing High Volume Data Feeds with MongoDB - FIX, FpML and Swift in association with C24 from MongoDB
It was a fun webinar to do, actually - I didn't know anything about C24's iO tool, so I learnt quite a lot as I watched John navigate the demo. My background in trying to debug raw FIX messages probably skewed my questions, I was definitely more interested in how to use it as a developer and what it could give me if I were doing production support. It's a dead interesting tool - I know for a fact that many organisations, banks in particular, spend a lot of time translating stuff from one format to another, before making some decision on on what to do with the contents. This tool does all the heavy lifting so you can get on with the interesting stuff, the stuff your business actually needs you to do.
In addition, as someone with more of an FS background than a NoSQL background, I was very interested to hear how lots of the financial institutions are using MongoDB already - the combination of not having an enforced schema but supporting structured data, supported by fast execution, makes it a good fit for a lot of the problems they're trying to solve. Yes, it's my job to say nice things about MongoDB, but when businesses are already using it because it makes their lives easier and meets their needs, it gives you a warm fuzzy feeling that the product must be doing something right.
I enjoyed giving this webinar, I think if I do any more I will suggest pairing on it (we all know two heads are better than one, right?) - it gives you some of the feedback and energy that's hard to get in a darkened room talking to a microphone.
My First Official MongoDB Appearance
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.