Team 15 Recap

Phoebe Voong-Fadel — Wed, 02 Dec 2020 23:35:34 +0000

The Collab Lab is a volunteer driven non-profit, which exists to help early-career developers gain their footholds in tech by providing real-world experience working on software teams. Each software team consists of four members and at least three mentors.

The Collab Lab ran four concurrent teams for the first time in October. This included launching our first Europe and Africa cohort! The duration of the programme is 8 weeks and on Sunday we had our last weekly sync meeting with team 15 (also known as TCL-15). As each week went by we saw TCL-15 grow and improve not only from a technical perspective, but also in terms of their soft skills.

Our team consisted of Sarah Eisa, Debora Galeano, Kenny (Yahaya) Kehinde and Hajar Nasr.

Sarah joined our team in week one after a participant dropped out due to getting her first developer role. She hit the ground running and instantly found her place on the team! Sarah demonstrated her technical flair throughout the project.
Debora’s confidence and skills grew over the duration of the program. With the encouragement of the team and mentors, Deborah also created her personal portfolio site leveraging the skills she gained from the project.
Kenny was always full of energy and enthusiasm despite working as a doctor as well! Kenny even gave his first Collab Lab lightning talk on an app he created.
Hajar’s warmth and considerate nature resonated throughout the team. Always striving to go that extra mile, I was blown away by Hajar’s determination to be a better programmer and team mate.

It was my first time mentoring a team but I shared this awesome responsibility with my fellow colleagues: Luka Baramishvili, Andrew Hedges and David Lluna. Luka was actually part of TCL-8 so he brought a unique perspective to the group, as he had been on the “other side”. Andrew is the creator of The Collab Lab so his experience and expertise was invaluable. David is a seasoned mentor who brought in many new initiatives to The Collab Lab to keep TCL-15 engaged and happy. Finally, I was a stay-at-home-mom turned Front-end Developer. I had gone through the process and wanted to help other folks break into the tech industry.

Our wonderful team of early-career developers and mentors spanned four time zones and were from seven different countries! Despite the time and cultural differences, the team instantly bonded and collaborated very well together.

The highlights and achievements of TCL-15:

Technically, the team members were very strong and capable developers. The app they created was extremely well architected. I learned a lot from reviewing their code!
The team were well organised and independent. They always completed their PRs on time or ahead of schedule. The PRs were always well written and comprehensive.
They were supportive and considerate of each other, which was often demonstrated through their PR peer reviews. Their comments were well thought out and team members often had questions about the code. They praised each other’s work when credit was due and questioned the code when aspects were unclear. All done in a tactful and empathetic way.
Some team members were a little self conscious of speaking at the weekly syncs, as English was not their first language. However, each week they took turns to demo the app or explain how their code functions. We could see the improvement in their public speaking, confidence and general communication skills. Great job!
The team went above and beyond the requirements. For example, the team created a side app to convert dates to milliseconds to help the mentors complete a PR review.
Their ability to exponentially improve their work each week and not being afraid to try different approaches was admirable. For example, after some feedback from David, the team changed their commit message formats with the intention to make it clearer for their peers and mentors. Similarly, their PR structures changed once or twice, depending on the difficulties of the descriptions and testing criteria. The level of professionalism was very high.

The result was a good looking, well functioning shopping list app:

Thank you for your hard work Sarah, Deborah, Kenny and Hajar. We are so excited to see what you will all do next! Any organisation would be lucky to have you on board as developers.

MongoDB Local in London 2019

Phoebe Voong-Fadel — Sat, 28 Sep 2019 10:52:53 +0000

I attended my first MongoDB in London on 25 September 2019. I first came across MongoDB while studying for my APIs and Microservices Certification with freeCodeCamp in the summer. It was the database behind the NodeJS apps I was building. I was curious about this innovative technology. So I started taking the free courses with MongoDB University. The more I learned, the more I realised how powerful MongoDB is. It’s interesting to see how the technology is evolving and it seems like it’s no longer just a NoSQL database.

This article is a quick overview of the sessions I attended at the MongoDB Local in London. Hope you enjoy!

Keynote

Co-founder and MongoDB CTO, Eliot Horowitz, led the keynote. Eliot gave an overview of the latest developments in MongoDB:

Full text search capabilities in MongoDB Atlas.
Visualising your data with MongoDB charts.
Building applications with MongoDB Stitch.
Client-side Encryption.
Realm

Full text search

It is expected that most modern applications have a search capability. MongoDB is now directly integrated with Lucene - an open-source text search library. So there’s no longer a need to install separate drivers. The text search is native to MongoDB and is built into MongoDB Atlas.

There was a demonstration to show how easy it is to set up. They used the movies sample dataset, which anyone can access if you have a MongoDB Atlas account. If you were to search for a film by title, the results are ranked with a score out of 10 to show its relevance. You can also enable type ahead, so the results are shown and filtered as you type.

MongoDB Charts

This is useful if you want to visualise your data. There was a demo where a user can log in to an exercise app and see how many steps they’ve taken. The data is presented in a bar chart. There’s a graphical user interface (GUI) and charts can be constructed in a matter of minutes. There are a broad range of graphs you can create. This includes using geospatial data to make GIS maps and treemaps.

I also went to the deep dive session for MongoDB charts. This was a more in depth demonstration of the features available.

Client side encryption

MongoDB 4.2 would allow applications on the client side, to encrypt fields with sensitive data before transmitting data to the server. Only apps with access to the encryption keys can decrypt the data.

I went to the session with Matthew Aylard. He demonstrated how to encrypt and decrypt data using client side encryption. Encrypted fields are stored as binary data. The data keys are used to decrypt the data. The data keys are stored in a “key vault” and the key vault is stored as a collection in a database. This data keys are encrypted using the Customer Master Keys (CMK) before they are stored in the key vault. A Key Management Service (KMS) is required to access a CMK.

MongoDB Stitch

MongoDB Stitch is the serverless platform, which you can use to build backend services on top of MongoDB Atlas.

I went to a workshop on MongoDB Stitch and followed a tutorial on a GitHub repository. There were MongoDB experts on hand to help and answer any questions. The purpose of the workshop was to write a movie title into my MongoDB Atlas cluster using a REST API POST webhook in MongoDB Stitch.

I tested to see if I could write to my cluster in MongoDB Atlas using POSTMAN. Then I had to then trigger a Stitch Function everytime I added a new film title to the database.

The Stitch Function would enrich and take information from OMDB API and add it to the document in my collection, such as the year and director. It would look this in my collection in MongoDB Compass:

It helps if you’ve worked with APIs and used MongoDB Atlas before. But there were step by step instructions for the workshop.

Realm

MongoDB acquired Realm in April 2019. Realm is a mobile database and data synchronisation technology. Realm has become RealmDB which will combine MongoDB Stitch to build mobile apps easily.

Tips and Tricks for Indexing

This session was a dive into the world of querying and indexing a collection. I’m currently taking the M201: MongoDB Performance course with MongoDB University and this was complimentary to my learning. Some good tips on how to use the Equality, Sort and Range model.

"Make it Matter" track

In addition to the more MongoDB technical sessions, there was a “Make it Matter” track. I wasn’t able to attend all the sessions but I was able to go to a couple. I went to a talk by Karen Huaulme on “How to return to the technical workforce after a parenting gap”. As a mother myself trying to break into the tech industry, I think this is a very important discussion to have. Karen recounted her experience and had some actionable tips on how to relaunch a career after taking a parenting gap.

Karen also mentioned the idea of “Returnships”, which I didn’t even know existed. Returnships are programmes run by companies support parents or those looking after elderly relatives to get back into the workplace. I took a picture of one of the slides which features some of the companies which offer this programme.

Summary

Overall, I enjoyed my experience at MongoDB Local in London. It was packed full of information about the new features in MongoDB. I liked the fact that there were a mixture of technical sessions and “Make it Matter” talks. The sessions covered topics such as parenting, coaching and mentoring. It was also great to see there was a Women’s and Trans Coders Lounge. This was an inclusive area where you can learn and socialise with other women and trans professionals in tech.

If you’re a MongoDB enthusiast and want to learn more about the technology, I recommend attending your nearest MongoDB Local. You’ll also get 50% off the MongoDB Professional Certification.

To view the keynote and other videos from the MongoDB Local in London, please go to the MongoDB YouTube Channel

Forem: Phoebe Voong-Fadel