I remember recent discussions in a developer community I belong to about MongoDB’s marketing efforts in Nigeria, and how they seemed somewhat misplaced given our market strengths and the fact that relational databases often perform better in real-world use cases. But I’ve noticed a few things lately:
- Edidiong Asikpo, a well-known Nigerian tech lead, joined MongoDB as a Developer Advocate about 8 months ago.
A good number of recent freeCodeCamp.org YouTube tutorials around Artificial Intelligence use MongoDB as their database of choice.
PayloadCMS (a Next.js-based headless CMS I’m currently specializing in) lists MongoDB as one of its recommended databases, alongside PostgreSQL and SQLite.
I’m currently building an app with Turso (SQLite) and Prisma, and the contrast is clear: while the tech itself is solid, resources are scarce. Most of my guidance comes from documentation and LLMs, since there’s a real lack of beginner-friendly tutorials, courses, and articles on this stack. It highlights how much marketing, community content, and accessible learning materials can shape a technology’s adoption.
I suspect the popularity of the old MERN stack was largely driven by MongoDB’s marketing push and its generous free tier. Today, if you’re learning relational databases, you’ll most likely end up on Supabase (PostgreSQL), since it’s one of the few free and accessible services for hobby projects (with Neon also starting to gain traction).
Basically, as with any skill development, the work you put in today might feel small, but it compounds over time. The junior devs of today will be the senior devs of tomorrow. And the tools they grow up with, will be the ones they know best.
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