The Learning Experience: Celebrating a Year of MongoDB Developer Days

One year ago today MongoDB held our first regional Developer Day event, a full-day experience designed to teach the fundamentals and advanced capabilities of MongoDB. Developer Day events have been held in person in over 35 cities, across 16 countries, and in seven languages. Initially created by a core team with a passion for enabling developers, a group of talented MongoDB Developer Advocates and Solution Architects have since scaled the program to directly engage and teach thousands of developers worldwide.

As developer relations programs go, engaging builders through hands-on workshops is hardly a new approach. But the difference at MongoDB is how closely we collaborate cross-functionally with other teams, and how focused we are on providing authentically hands-on, engaging experiences for developers.

From the start, the MongoDB Developer Day program was a collaborative effort to take a platform that is easy to get started with and to introduce more advanced capabilities in a compelling way. Based on the helpful and positive feedback we continue to get from participants, we know Developer Days help developers gain skills and a sense of accomplishment as they alternate between instruction and applying that learning through hands-on exercises.

To share more about what has made Developer Days so successful, I asked members of that core team-Lead Developer Advocate Joel Lord, and Sr Developer Advocates Mira Vlaeva and Diego Freniche Brito-to reflect on key areas that went into creating this enduring experience.

Our Developer Day class at MongoDB.local NYC in May, 2024

A sense of accomplishment

"We all agreed that a Developer Day should focus on hands-on learning, where developers can experiment with MongoDB, potentially make mistakes, and take pride in building something on their own," Mira said. "The goal was to build a fun learning experience rather than just sitting and listening to lectures all day."

The curriculum was designed to encourage developers to work together at certain points as they advance from data modeling and schema design concepts to implementing powerful Atlas Search and Vector Search capabilities. "One of my favorite moments of the day is when people start working together," Joel said. "At the beginning of the day, our attendees can be a little hesitant, but they quickly begin to collaborate with each other, and it's wonderful to witness that happen."

Building great Developer Days together

While our MongoDB Developer Relations team designed the agenda and course material, it was our partnerships with other teams and stakeholders that helped Developer Days take flight. There were many key stakeholders that shared a vision for enabling developers to realize more value with our platform.

As Joel remembers, "We had to work and collaborate with a number of other teams, which was, at the time, new to us." Among the key teams involved, Diego added, "Working with Field and Strategic Marketing teams has been a great experience. They help us so much with all the really important tasks… there's so much they've done that Developer Days wouldn't be a reality without them."

The program has expanded our collaboration with several other teams, including marketing, product, and sales, to ensure our courses remain up-to-date and we make the most of our time in each city by welcoming developers from key accounts.

Continued success and improvements

To ensure Developer Days were as impactful as possible, we initially ran the program as a pilot in seven cities. In addition to noting live observations and interactions, we used surveys to collect feedback and report on an NPS (net promoter score) to assess whether the event exceeded participant expectations. These initial events were spaced out enough that the team could implement improvements and try new approaches at subsequent Developer Days.

"We had the opportunity to run the same labs multiple times, make small changes each time, and observe how people react to the different configurations," said Mira, who continues to contribute improvements such as new interactive elements.

As we continue to bring the Developer Day experience to new cities, we're also taking Developer Days online. "There are so many reasons why people may not be able to attend our in-person events," said Lauren Schaefer, who recently rejoined MongoDB Developer Relations to lead the program forward. "I look forward to working with my team to tackle the challenges of bringing our curriculum successfully online."

So a year later, I want to say thank you to everyone who has made Developer Days a success-from seven staff members who supported our first event in Chicago, to the roughly 100 talented people across MongoDB who are now part of the program. Even more importantly, I'm thankful for all of the participants (across 35 great cities and 16 countries!) that joined us for this full-day experience. As I love to say at the beginning of every Developer Day, we're here to learn from each other. I hope you've learned as much from us as we have from you!

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