Back in 2007, Dwight Merriman and Eliot Horowitz formed a company named 10gen to create a better platform to host web applications. The idea was to create a hosting as a service that will allow developers to focus on building their application, rather than handle hardware management and infrastructure scaling. Soon, they discovered the community wasn't keen on giving up so much of the control over their application's infrastructure. As a result, they released the different parts of the platform as open source projects.
One such project was a document-based database solution called MongoDB. Derived from the word humongous, MongoDB was able to support complex data storage, while maintaining the high-performance approach of other NoSQL stores. The community cheerfully adopted this new paradigm, making MongoDB one of the fastest-growing databases in the world. With more than 150 contributors and over 10,000 commits, it also became one of the most popular open source projects...