G’day, I’m Stennie . I joined the MongoDB engineering team in mid-2012 when we started the office in Sydney . For my first 7 years at MongoDB I was part of the Technical Services org where I was involved with support, training (internal & external), consulting, and knowledge management. In September 2019 I moved to the Developer Relations org to help scale our community interaction and self-service options.
You may come across me commenting on the occasional MongoDB question on community channels including Stack Overflow, DBA Stack Exchange, Twitter, GitHub, or here on the new MongoDB Community site.
When I find spare time outside of family and travel, I often contribute to open source projects I use such as mtools (Python scripts for MongoDB log analysis & launching test deployments), m (bash script for managing multiple local versions of MongoDB server), and Mongo Hacker (JavaScript extensions for the mongo shell). You may sense a subtle theme connecting these projects which happen to use different programming languages
I look forward to seeing the MongoDB community continue to thrive.
If you’ve found any of my contributions extra helpful, I’d be interested in feedback on your favourites (and why).
I’ve been an on and off student @ Mongo U. Thanks for all that you have contributed to my learning experience and thank you for sharing with us some of the cool tools that you use. I’m thinking that I may have to try them all. I’m especially looking forward to installing and running m. I’ve been hoping to find a local version manager for MongoDB for awhile now. Good thing that I clicked on this thread!
Welcome @Robert_Cochran, great to have you here! I’d especially appreciate any feedback you have on site accessibility (there’s a Site Feedback category for all feedback).
Although in-person user groups aren’t an option in most locations at the moment, virtual events are definitely possible if you might be interested in volunteering to present (and/or find presenters) for a session.
Since virtual events can reach a much broader audience, we have set up a Global Virtual Community chapter on our new user group platform. You can contact the organisers of this (or any of our other) user groups via the MUG chapter page or start a new discussion in the User Groups forum category.
We are also looking for community co-organisers for our user groups, so perhaps you may be interested in helping with the Austin MUG.
Hi there @Stennie_X , I love the new badges for first accepted solutions. Awesome! I am also super interested in trying to contribute to open source projects, and because of my extreme interest in MongoDB, I was hoping to contribute to something related to Mongo. DO you have any suggestions for someone who is new to contributing to open source? I am not unfamiliar with github, only working with others in github. I would very much like to change that and looking for any help that I can get.
Open source contribution normally begins from something you use (or would like to use). There’s a very broad scope of potential projects, but I assume you have specific interests in terms of tech stack and types of applications or tools to contribute to.
What sort of tech stack and projects are you looking to work with?
If you are looking for a collaborative project to help develop specific skills, I would consider if there are any established projects you are already using that you might be able to contribute to. Almost all of the projects I contribute to or maintain are ones I use, with the exception of occasional PRs that arise from community discussion.
Starting with small changes like improvements to documentation, testing, or trying to reproduce some of the open issues are great ways to become familiar with a project and the maintainer(s). Projects that are more open to contributors will typically have a README and Contributing Guide that will help orient you. For example, see the get-started-readme from my colleague @wan or WildAid’s O-FISH project which uses MongoDB Realm.
If you really aren’t fussed on what sort of project you want to contribute to, there are some tagging conventions on GitHub like help-wanted or good-first-issue. You could search relevant tagged issues with some additional keywords like mongodb and your preferred programming language. GitHub also has a short guide: Finding ways to contribute to open source on GitHub - GitHub Docs.
You can also contribute to MongoDB documentation, drivers, Compass, Server, etc … but typically interest would start from a specific improvement or bug you are looking to address rather than looking through the open list of issues which others have reported.
An important consideration to keep in mind with code contributions to any open source project is that once a maintainer accepts your pull request, they will end up dealing with any bugs or support requests that arise. Adding test coverage and documentation will help reassure maintainers that they are not merging a change which might lead to significantly more support work for them.
Thanks @Stennie_X This is extremely helpful && motivating my friend! I’ll be seeing you after some reading and looking. Awesome stuff. Thanks for the direction.
. I joined the MongoDB engineering team in mid-2012 when we started the office in Sydney 
. For my first 7 years at MongoDB I was part of the Technical Services org where I was involved with support, training (internal & external), consulting, and knowledge management. In September 2019 I moved to the Developer Relations org to help scale our community interaction and self-service options.
Welcome to the MongoDB Community 
.
Thanks for the direction.