I spent today at Codeland, a one day conference in NYC designed for developers in the early stages of their careers. Just as at CSTA, I was there with the GitHub contingent. Codeland had talks and a keynote in a common auditorium, smaller breakout workshops and a couple of small vendor areas. I spent most of the morning upstairs in the GitHub lounge so I onl caught part of one morning talk.

With ISTE ending, the next big event for CS treachers is the annual CSTA Conference. I first attended two years ago in Baltimore. Last year the conference, in Omaha was bigger and better in every way imaginable. I expect this year to be the best yet. I don't go to a lot of conferences so I don't have much to compare CSTA with but I like the fact that it's is about half the size of SIGCSE.

For those of you who don't know, MongoDB is a very popular NoSQL database. NoSQL is an overarching term describing databases that are not relational and don't implement Structured Query Language (SQL). In a relational database your data is stored in tables with columns - think spreadsheet where each row of the table is a record in the database. You link tables together via a common field or row name.