markofu’s blog

I'm just back from a superb (or in "American" : super exciting) MongoDB London conference. I've been told there were over 500 attendees and as you can see below, the venue was sweet :) I have uploaded my slides to SpeakerDeck, I'm no longer using Slideshare as a repository for my presentations (I just don't think it's as good visually or in terms of a usage experience). Using the MongoDB Monitoring Service (MMS) Securing your MongoDB Implementation Thankfully the two presentations went well and I received great feedback (hey @rozza, no yellow discs buddy - yellow discs indicated a sub-par presentation, blue = good and green = excellent :) ). More importantly, there was no "Black Screen of Death" on the MBP unlike at IrissCon ! Please have a look at the slides and if there are any questions or mistakes, please let me know. Thanks to the whole 10gen team (especially the community folk) for organising such an awesome event and more i...

So last night I spoke at the Dublin Google Development Group , which is held in the Google Offices in Barrow Street . For all the times I've passed those offices, either by foot or train, I've never actually been in there and usually looked enviously upon their facilities (I believe they've now got a 25m pool, which for me would be, well, awesome). I was invited by Eoin Bailey (from Trinity), who up until last night (I believe), has been running the group and interestingly, the "head" of the group cannot be a Google employee. Apart from the slick, professional set-up there's also food and non-alcoholic drinks beforehand with a potential retirement to the Schoolhouse afterwards. The facilities were obviously excellent, sweet theatre ("What's up Doc" was the name I believe) with excellent seating, screens etc as you'd expect. The group were seemed interested in my talk but I think I lost most folk when I began talking about sharding, possib...

So back in July, I wrote a blog post talking about my experiences being a so-called "phone jockey", i.e. a support engineer, for 10gen. For those cynics out there, it wasn't written by HR, modified by marketing or requested by management or anyone in our recruiting team - I wrote it off my own back because I've a tendency to do things off my own back I wanted to explain what being a "support engineer" actually meant and more specifically, what it entailed in a small, innovative, fun company like 10gen I now have somewhere to point people too when they ask my what life as a "support engineer" in 10gen is like to get kudos within 10gen and please management When I wrote the blog post, I intended it to be a once-off (why would anyone agree to writing a multi-part blog series) but I was encouraged to at least write a second post by @francium and she's very cool so I let it slide and agreed!!! One of the ideas that I had was talking ...

There's a mis-conception around the role of a "Support Engineer".  As a clue, it's not what Urban Dictionary   says   - A person whose job is to answer calls from customers of a small- to large-sized company...... They are teathered to a their desk all day via phone headset........ phone jockeys usually hate their jobs.......they are are paid well enough..........until they completely burn out, and hate everyone.   and doesn't always involve this - Image Source: http://half-bakedbaker.blogspot.ie/2009/11/cannoli-and-broken-computer.html As you can see  here , there's lots of open roles in  10gen  and more specifically with 10gen, in  Dublin . I thought I'd write this quick blog to explain what Support Engineers actually do and why I joined 10gen as a "Support Engineer". I could be wrong but didn't Google come up with term " Site Reliability Engineer " to do away with the stigma associated with being a...