Empowering Aspiring Developers in Africa: The MongoDB, MyTechDev Partnership

Thalita Carrico
May 8, 2024 | Updated: May 10, 2024
#University

It's been nearly a year since the announcement of the partnership between MongoDB University and MyTechDev (Dev-Net), marking a significant milestone in empowering African developers with practical coding skills and enterprise technology pathways. This partnership aims to certify 500 people in Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, and Egypt, aligning with the rising demand for skilled software developers globally.

“At MongoDB, we love developers and are pleased to provide free, on-demand educational content for new learners and professional developers who want to expand their existing skill sets on the learning platform of their choice,” said Raghu Viswanathan, Vice President, Education, Documentation, and Academia at MongoDB.

One of the remarkable outcomes of this collaboration is showcased in a recent video from MyTechDev (Dev-Net), where students share their experiences with MongoDB. Through hands-on learning facilitated by MyTechDev (Dev-Net) and free on-demand courses on MongoDB University, these students not only gained technical expertise but also found a supportive community that encouraged them through challenges, paving the way for future career aspirations and entrepreneurial ventures.

The MyTechDev (Dev-Net) students' testimonials reflect the impact of accessible education and industry partnerships in fostering innovation and career opportunities in technology. By equipping individuals with in-demand skills like MongoDB proficiency, this collaboration addresses the skills gap. It fuels the ambitions of aspiring developers across Africa, promising a brighter future for the tech ecosystem on the continent.

Investing in education isn't just about boosting opportunities; it's about saving lives. A recent study in The Lancet Public Health says what many have long suspected: education significantly impacts health outcomes. Regardless of age, gender, or socio-economic status, every year of schooling reduces mortality by 2%. This finding is particularly pertinent in sub-Saharan Africa, home to the world's youngest population, 70% under 30, and a GDP lagging far behind. Many of these young people face dire circumstances, with poverty and lack of resources hindering their access to education.

The MongoDB for Academia program provides free resources for students and educators to make the most of MongoDB. The program also offers students MongoDB Atlas credits and free certification through the GitHub Student Developer Pack. These benefits are available globally, allowing students to enter the workforce with industry-relevant skills and certifications.

To learn more, students and educators can register for the MongoDB for Students or MongoDB for Educators programs.

← Previous

New Atlas Administrator Learning Path and Certification

Say hello to MongoDB’s newest education addition—the MongoDB Atlas Administrator Path , your guide to successfully prepare for and pass the new Associate Atlas Administrator certification ! This is the second certification and learning path we launched in 2024, a testament to our unwavering dedication to helping developers validate their skills. Certifications offer concrete evidence of expertise, bolstering credibility and marketability to employers. Thousands of developers have reaped the benefits of being MongoDB certified! Unlock your potential: Follow the learning path to success The new MongoDB Atlas Administrator Path will guide you through the foundations of MongoDB Atlas, the multi-cloud developer data platform. You'll learn to quickly get up and running with a free MongoDB Atlas Cluster. Additionally, this path will cover the basic steps for creating, securing, monitoring, and administering a new cluster using both the UI and CLI. Upon completing the learning path, not only will you feel prepared to take the certification exam, but you'll also automatically unlock a 50% discount on the exam. What’s more, the new Associate Atlas Administrator certification is designed to validate a candidate's mastery and competence, demonstrating their proficiency as a MongoDB Atlas Administrator. Once certified, you're equipped to effectively administer MongoDB Atlas, implement security measures, optimize performance, and manage version upgrades with confidence. MongoDB’s certifications hold the official seal of recognition from the worldwide tech community, affirming and validating your MongoDB expertise. These certifications aren't just pieces of paper—they're powerful catalysts for propelling your career to new heights and boosting your appeal to future employers. According to the Microsoft Certification Program Satisfaction Study, 91% of hiring managers report certification as an important criterion for hiring. As a certified pro, you'll have the opportunity to showcase your accomplishments with pride, gaining visibility in the Credly Talent Directory and earning a distinctive Credly badge that sets you apart from the crowd. But you don’t just take our word for it. Samuel Molling, MongoDB certified as an Associate DBA, Associate Developer, and Associate Data Modeler, has benefited firsthand from MongoDB certifications: “As soon as I got my first DBA certification, I received an exciting offer from a company to be a MongoDB specialist with a very attractive salary,” he said. “The company found me through MongoDB's certificates page (Credly Talent Directory). Due to the certifications, I acquired a lot of experience, grew my network, and received offers from both national and international companies. I managed to close contracts with clients for my company, and this gives me more and more visibility.“ Having a technical certification is invaluable in today's competitive job market, showcasing expertise and dedication to professional growth. Our decision to create a tailored learning path for our customers came from the belief in equipping developers with the tools necessary to succeed. As evidenced by Samuel's testimonial, obtaining a certification can be a game-changer, opening up new opportunities and advancing one's professional trajectory. Do you ever feel stuck and unsure of where to start? Look no further! Dive into MongoDB's free online educational resources for hands-on learning, quizzes, and labs. Elevate your skills with our new learning path and certification tailored to boost your Atlas Admin expertise. Get started now!

May 6, 2024
Next →

Payments Modernization and the Role of the Operational Data Layer

To stay relevant and competitive, payment solution providers must enhance their payment processes to adapt to changing customer expectations, regulatory demands, and advancing technologies. The imperative for modernization is clear: payment systems must become faster, more secure, and seamlessly integrated across platforms. Driven by multiple factors—real-time payments, regulatory shifts like Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2), heightened customer expectations, the power of open banking, and the disruptive force of fintech startups—the need for payment modernization has never been more pressing. But transformation is not without its challenges. Complex systems, industry reliance on outdated technology, high upgrade costs, and technical debt all pose formidable obstacles. This article will explore modernization approaches and how MongoDB helps smooth transformations. Approaches to modernization As businesses work to modernize their payment systems, they need to overcome the complexities inherent in updating legacy systems. Forward-thinking organizations embrace innovative strategies to streamline their operations, enhance scalability, and facilitate agile responses to evolving market demands. Two such approaches gaining prominence in the realm of payment system modernization are domain-driven design and microservices architecture : Domain-driven design: This approach focuses on a business's core operations to develop scalable and easier-to-manage systems. Domain-driven design ensures that technology serves strategic business goals by aligning system development with business needs. At its core, this approach seeks to break down complex business domains into manageable components, or "domains," each representing a distinct area of business functionality. Microservices architecture: Unlike traditional monolithic architectures, characterized by tightly coupled and interdependent components, a microservices architecture decomposes applications into a collection of loosely coupled services, each of which is responsible for a specific business function or capability. It introduces more flexibility and allows for quicker updates, facilitating agile responses to changing business requirements. Discover how Wells Fargo launched their next-generation card payments by building an operational data store with MongoDB . Modernizing with an operational data layer In the payments modernization process, the significance of an operational data layer (ODL) cannot be overstated. An ODL is an architectural pattern that centrally integrates and organizes siloed enterprise data, making it available to consuming applications. The simplest representation of this pattern looks something like the sample reference architecture below. Figure 1: Operational Data Layer structure An ODL is deployed in front of legacy systems to enable new business initiatives and to meet new requirements that the existing architecture can’t handle—without the difficulty and risk of fully replacing legacy systems. It can reduce the workload on source systems, improve availability, reduce end-user response times, combine data from multiple systems into a single repository, serve as a foundation for re-architecting a monolithic application into a suite of microservices, and more. The ODL becomes a system of innovation, allowing the business to take an iterative approach to digital transformation. Here's why an ODL is considered ideal for payment operations: Unified data management: Payment systems involve handling a vast amount of diverse data, including transaction details, customer information, and regulatory compliance data. An ODL provides a centralized repository for storing and managing this data, eliminating silos and ensuring data integrity. Real-time processing: An ODL enables real-time processing of transactions, allowing businesses to handle high numbers of transactions swiftly and efficiently. This capability is essential for meeting customer expectations for instant payments and facilitating seamless transactions across various channels. Scalability and flexibility: Payment systems must accommodate fluctuating transaction volumes and evolving business needs. An ODL offers scalability and flexibility, allowing businesses to scale their infrastructure as demand grows. Enhanced security: An ODL incorporates robust security features —such as encryption, access controls, and auditing capabilities—to safeguard data integrity and confidentiality. By centralizing security measures within the ODL, businesses can ensure compliance with regulatory requirements and mitigate security risks effectively. Support for payments data monetization: Payment systems generate a wealth of data that can provide valuable insights into customer behavior, transaction trends, and business performance. An ODL facilitates real-time analytics and reporting by providing a unified platform for collecting, storing, and analyzing this data. Transform with MongoDB MongoDB’s fundamental technology principles ensure companies can reap the advantages of microservices and domain-driven design—specifically, our flexible data model and built-in redundancy, automation, and scalability. Indeed, the document model is tailor-made for the intricacies of payment data, ensuring adaptability and scalability as market demands evolve. Here’s how MongoDB helps with domain-driven design and microservice implementation to adopt industry best practices: Ease of use: MongoDB’s document model makes it simple to model or remodel data to fit the needs of payment applications. Documents are a natural way of describing data. They present a single data structure, with related data embedded as sub-documents and arrays, making it simpler and faster for developers to model how data in the application will be mapped to data stored in the database. In addition, MongoDB guarantees the multi-record ACID transactional semantics that developers are familiar with, making it easier to reason about data. Flexibility: MongoDB’s dynamic schema is ideal for handling the requirements of microservices and a domain-driven design. Domain-driven design emphasizes modeling the domain to reflect the business requirements, which may evolve over time. MongoDB's flexible schema allows you to store domain objects as documents without rigid schema constraints, facilitating agile development and evolution of the domain model. Speed: Using MongoDB for an ODL means you can get better performance when accessing data, and write less code to do so. A document is a single place for the database to read and write data for an entity. This locality of data ensures the complete document can be accessed in a single database operation that avoids the need internally to pull data from many different tables and rows. Data access and microservice-based APIs: MongoDB integrates seamlessly with modern technologies and frameworks commonly used in microservices architectures. MongoDB's flexible data model and ability to handle various data types, including structured and unstructured data, is a great fit for orchestrating your open API ecosystem to make data flow between banks, third parties, and consumers possible. Scalability: Even if an ODL starts at a small scale, you need to be prepared for growth as new source systems are integrated, adding data volume, and new consuming systems are developed, increasing workload. MongoDB provides horizontal scale-out on low-cost, commodity hardware or cloud infrastructure using sharding to meet the needs of an ODL with large data sets and high throughput requirements. High availability: Microservices architectures require high availability to ensure that individual services remain accessible even in the event of failures. MongoDB provides built-in replication and failover capabilities, ensuring data availability and minimal downtime in case of server failures. Payment modernization is not merely a trend but a strategic imperative. By embracing modern payment solutions and leveraging the power of an ODL with MongoDB, organizations can unlock new growth opportunities, enhance operational efficiency, and deliver superior customer experiences. Learn how to build an operational data layer with MongoDB using this Payments Modernization Solution Accelerator . Learn more about how MongoDB is powering industries on our solution library .

May 15, 2024