I just picked up a great book, Managing Brand Equity by David A. Aaker, a professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. The book discusses different assets of brands and how to manage them effectively to increase growth and profitability over time. As with many successful marketing case studies, Aaker begins with Procter & Gamble, namely Ivory soap, and explores different components of what a brand means to consumers and how it has successfully or unsuccessfully impacted a business over time. In the first 60 pages he identifies an enthusiastic community and customer loyalty as a brand asset.

Yesterday I started the MongoDB for Developers course. Although I’ve been working at 10gen for almost a year, and I’ve learned a lot about MongoDB in the process, the first part of the course has taught me a few things I didn’t know about MongoDB’s JSON. This is elementary to getting started with MongoDB

I’ve become a conference CFP dealer. Conferences are great arenas for community members interested in showcasing their projects, startups and innovations with MongoDB. I’ve been sending CFPs to everyone from my own colleagues to MongoDB community members every week for the past six months. I started posting some of these to my blog every other Monday, but I also wanted to share where I find these CFPs.

Most of my former classmates are going back to school in the fall, many of them as candidates for JDs and PhDs, and I’m a little jealous.

10gen recently partnered with RaisedBy.Us a platform for company giving. We were challenged to give as little as $1 from every paycheck for the next 6 months, through RaisedBy.Us. I was thrilled that we had gotten involved in the program and was excited to spearhead the challenge with my colleagues in HR.

I joined 10gen last November because I thought MongoDB was awesome, so it seemed like a natural progression to start learning up the technology. To encourage myself I started a blog (called Teach Me How to Mongo), and started hacking away. But slowly, one thing led to another and I stopped hacking. I hacked one project, which was a repository of a huge reading list I’ve kept over the past six years. But after that I found it difficult to motivate myself. I really needed something to get me back in the swing of things and learning basic MongoDB development administration skills.

With great brands come great responsibility. If you are at the stage where you need to advertise your startup’s existence to the world at conferences, events and in living rooms across the world, then you are in the fortunate position to think about purchasing SWAG!

This weekend I attended my second HackNY Hackathon at NYU’s Courant Institute. HackNY is an organization, started by two computer science professors, whose goal is engage, educate and retain top college talent for New York City’s startups. They’re an excellent organization that has done a great job recruiting excellent students to New York City Startups. Their Hackathons–held once a semester–bring together over 300 students from all across the East Coast (and some students even fly out from the midwest!) for 20 hours of hacking. I’ve met some of the most talented students at HackNY’s hackathons, and I’m thrilled that 10gen can support the work that they do.

For the better part of the past year I’ve been helping organize MongoDB User Groups around the globe. 10gen currently helps support 68 MongoDB User Groups with over 13,000 members (and more user groups are added every day!). The MongoDB User Group (MUG) network has grown in large part thanks to the great work of the MUG organizers who have worked tremendously to ensure that our groups meet on a regular basis and have interesting content. I’ve learned a lot about organizing meetup groups from our MUG organizers and other community leaders around the world. Here’s a few tips I’ve learned from them.

When you bring incredible people together, you only need to give them a little guidance in order for them to deliver something awesome. This Thursday was the third annual MongoDB Masters summit in New York City, and I experienced just that. Each year, we bring together our core contributors, our MongoDB Masters, to a large MongoDB conference, to network with one another and the 10gen engineering team.