Abstract
MongoDB with a frustration instead of a business plan. Databases were rigid and getting outpaced by the rest of the tech stack. This frustration resulted in showing up at meetups, passionate arguments on forums, listening, learning, and building in the open. The community became co-conspirators rather than users.
We made mistakes, shipped features fast, and were often humbled. But what looked like mistakes resulted in continuous improvements in the code, features, and the co-conspirators around it.
We trace that journey: The architectural bets. The hard lessons in building trust and resilience at scale. The product tenets that turned early skepticism into widespread adoption. We will share the way open source turned into the engine of a sustainable and formidable business. Why we chose to monetize developer convenience instead of control. How we earned enterprise trust without compromising our values, and how a developer-first philosophy became a competitive moat.
This is the story of an underdog that didn’t come from Silicon Valley. We will attempt to inspire you to build in the MongoDB way, making longer term bets, and building formidable business through open source.
Speaker
Akshat Vig
Distinguished Engineer @MongoDB, Previously Senior Principal Engineer NoSQL@AWS
Akshat Vig is a Distinguished Eningeer at MongoDB. Akshat has been working on DynamoDB since its inception. He is one of the primary authors on the DynamoDB paper published at USENIX. DynamoDB is one of the largest and most mission critical distributed systems in the world, and underpins much of AWS, Amazon, and the internet ecosystem today. As a Principal engineer, Akshat solves some of the most difficult distributed systems problems at Amazon across multiple services. He has filed close to 100 patents, served on IEEE program committees, and has given keynotes around the world. He is excited to solve the next big challenge in distributed systems.
