The Developers' Developers: Two Australian Developers Share Their Connections to Customers

The world’s 28 million software developers are writing the foundations of our future, propelling innovation for their organizations through lines of code by creating game-changing new apps. Indeed, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that between 2022 and 2032, the number of software developers, quality assurance analysts, and testers will grow 24%, “much faster than the average for all occupations.”

Fueling this innovative workforce is another group of developers, the people working behind the scenes to build the tools, technologies and platforms that other developers need to be successful: the developers’ developers.

Many developers at MongoDB—which after all was built by developers for developers, and is beloved by enterprises and startups alike—fall into this camp. To learn more about what makes these developers tick, we talked with two Australia-based senior software engineers at MongoDB who love to code for their peers.

For Lavender Chan and Angus Lee, there’s nothing like seeing the ripple effect of the code they have been working on and the impact it has on their customers.

What’s more, the opportunity to be a “developer’s developer” has allowed Chan and Lee to find a space for deep technical work while thriving in an autonomous environment.

At MongoDB, we believe developers will build the future. First, can you share more about your roles and what you’re working on?

Lavender Chan (LC):

I work on the Relational Migrator tool, which allows developers to migrate SQL data onto MongoDB. I joined the company two and a half years ago, and have been part of the Sydney technology scene for the last 10 years. The appeal of joining MongoDB was that it’s a large global company, but in the engineering team, you are able to have a big impact and a lot of autonomy.

Relational Migrator was a greenfield project, and our team has been able to take the original product idea built out of the US and run with it. I’m a full stack developer and have touched on every feature of the tool. A lot of the engineers were able to contribute and work on new ideas.

There’s also a strong emphasis on culture here which practically means a lot of the people I work with are excited to be here and passionate about their roles.

Angus Lee (AL):

I work in the MongoDB Charts team in Australia and think our team is a sweet spot for developers. I’ve interned for other tech companies and started my career at MongoDB. Since then I’ve been given responsibilities where I can create a lot of impact.

My role at MongoDB in Sydney has also given me great opportunities to connect directly to the developers we are creating products for in a way that pushes my work to a higher level.

Your roles are focused on products targeted to other developers. How does developing for developers affect your approach to your work?

LC:

In our roles we are creating directly for other developers, so the work that I am doing is deeply technical and specific.

As Migrator is a newer product, we are able to interact directly with our customers—other developers—and often a lot of their questions are quite complex and specific, which means I go on a learning journey in debunking and fixing their problems.

AL:

We have a strong team culture in that as developers we want to be our own users. That means we want to use other MongoDB team products, and they use ours, so we can better identify pain points and issues for our customers.

There’s a term that developers use called “dogfooding” that really sums up how we think on this, which basically means to use your own product. It means for me that I think about writing clean code to help any other developers extend on this, and how effective what I do will be for the user.

What I’ve also learnt is how our product helps other products thrive. We should have done all the hard work to transform data and show it through data visualizsation tools so it’s easy for the customer.

Can you tell us more about this connection to customers and how MongoDB empowers developers?

LC:

When Relational Migrator was released as a general product, I went to MongoDB World to work at the booth, and I talked to the developers and customers using the platform. As an engineer, it was an amazing experience and opportunity to see how it was being used and what else we could be doing.

This connection of engineers with customers, as well as the ability to speak to them regularly in my role, is unique.

In other companies I would need to go through support teams, to go through someone else just to push out a bug fix. Our team is very customer focused, so we can prioritizse features that our customers want.

AL:

One of the best moments for me at MongoDB was when I went to MongoDB World and I sat down with a customer to talk through a feature of Charts. It was a pivotal moment to see the improvements it makes for the businesses that use it, and the impact it generates for their customers beyond that. I could sit back and see the ripple effect of the code I’m writing.

There is also a great feedback engine where our users can submit ideas and other users can vote for that feature. The product managers pick from these and push out features that are directly relevant to the developers using it.

We really connect through our aim to create an open forum for developers and customers to provide feedback and suggest ideas.

Developers are problem solvers. As part of the MongoDB Love Your Developers campaign, we believe in championing the voice of developers and giving them the freedom to experiment and innovate. How do you see this in action?

LC:

In other places, I was a small cog in a massive system. At MongoDB, I really have an impact and can see directly how my work translates to our final product. In Sydney, we’re a satellite office, but it’s indicative of our company culture that there is huge trust placed in these teams.

We’re given high impact projects and can run with them, which means I’ve been able to watch the Relational Migrator product go from a tiny product used by only a few customers, to one that is now generally available.

Not many engineers get to work for a well-established, large company and still have the opportunity to work on and release products like a startup.

There is a strong global interest in AI-driven innovations. How have your connections to customers led to innovations in this area?

AL:

We’ve been able to take an idea for a new AI feature, Natural Language Charts, and take it from concept to being released as a feature at MongoDB.local in London.

We could see from our conversations with customers, as well as broader industry trends, that there was strong interest in new AI features, so we were able to prioritize it for Charts.

We started with nothing and were given the freedom to research how this feature could work using AI, create a new proof of concept, and from there we were able to push it out into a feature which was a really proud moment.

Having this agility and flexibility to prioritize something new is exactly what we want to provide to our customers. I never feel like I'm just churning out code. We are connected to the work and to our customers.