The developer experience of building a database | Tara Hernandez (MongoDB, Google)

Engineering Enablement by Abi Noda

Tara Hernandez, the VP of Developer Productivity at MongoDB, joins the podcast to give an inside look at what the developer experience looks like at an organization that develops a database. Here, Tara shares what it looks like to develop, test, and release changes at MongoDB, while also providing insight into how the company invests in developer productivity more broadly.

Discussion points:

• (0:57) What was going on at the time Tara joined
• (4:37) Tara’s perspective on the buzz of platform engineering
• (7:38) What’s involved in building and testing a database
• (10:11) The development environment at MongoDB
• (13:14) How testing works
• (16:50) What the release process looks like
• (19:27) What goes into performance testing a release
• (21:31) MongoDB’s investment in engineering enablement
• (22:39) Takeaways from working on databases
• (24:24) Affecting cultural change
• (26:40) Opportunities Tara’s team identified to change culture
• (29:12) Managing technical debt
• (33:06) MongoDB’s culture around developer experience
• (34:59) Why Evergreen CI is open source

Mentions and links:
Follow Tara on LinkedIn or Twitter
Read more about MongoDB’s “Evergreen” Continuous Integration
Visit MongoDB’s engineering blog