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

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