Friday was my last day with 10gen working on MongoDB.

My first day at 10gen was December 1, 2009. The stable release of MongoDB was v1.0 (v1.2 would be released 9 days later).  10gen was Dwight, Eliot, Mike, Kristina, Mathias and Kyle huddled around a desk in a shared office on the 8th floor of 17 W 18th Street (and Aaron based out of the Bay Area). Sourceforge had started talking about how they were migrating large portions of their site to MongoDB. 

10gen and MongoDB have come some ways since then. More than any milestone though, what sticks out for me are the thousands (quite literally!) of interactions I’ve had with MongoDB users over the past 2 years and 7 months. These users were taking a bet on an cutting-edge product. They were energized that databases can be fun to work with. And they were eager to be part a group that is upending traditional notions of what enterprise software can be. The same  energy and camaraderie exists today - among a developer community that now numbers probably over a few hundred thousand. That is quite amazing and I’m sure that there are many great days ahead for 10gen.

I’ve written about what it is like to work at 10gen, about community building, and a lot about open source software. Being part of 10gen over the past 3 years has encompassed all of that - and its been unique combination of product + timing + people + company culture + business model. I’m going to miss it. I’ve learned tremendously, though, and I’m excited to apply that to new problems, challenges, and opportunities.  

For those of you who only have my old 10gen contact info - I can be reached on email, linkedin, and twitter. If you are cooking up something in the cloud/data/mongodb areas, or just want to say hi, drop me a line!