Building a REST API With Express Framework and MongoDB

May 8, 2026 Nic Raboy

Almost every modern web application will need a REST API for the frontend to communicate with, and in almost every scenario, that frontend is going to expect to work with JSON data. As a result, the best development experience will come from a stack that will allow you to use JSON throughout, with no transformations that lead to overly complex code.

Take MongoDB, Express Framework, and Node.js as an example.

Node.js and Express Framework handle your application logic, receiving requests from clients, and sending responses back to them. MongoDB is the database that sits between those requests and responses. In this example, the client can send JSON to the application and the application can send the JSON to the database. The database will respond with JSON and that JSON will be sent back to the client. This works well because MongoDB is a document database that works with BSON, a JSON-like data format.

In this tutorial, we'll see how to create an elegant REST API using MongoDB and Express Framework.

Build a Real-Time Voice Interview Coach with TypeScript and LiveKit

May 6, 2026 Nic Raboy

Do you struggle with interviews? You're not alone! You can have the best interview notes in the world, but when you start having that vocal conversation, you might end up a deer in the headlights, freezing and forgetting everything you thought you prepared for.

There's good news though!

With modern AI tools like LiveKit, you can have a voice conversation with an AI agent, mocking a real interview experience. Imagine uploading a job description and your resume and being immediately paired with an expert (the agent) to ask you real questions for the job and providing feedback on how you answer and present yourself.

In this tutorial we'll explore using LiveKit and TypeScript, paired with various LLM models and Apache Tika, to establish a very realistic interview coaching experience.

Introducing CFP Manager to Manage Speaking Engagements for the Team

May 1, 2026 Nic Raboy

Are you speaking at Meetups, conferences, and other events frequently? How are you keeping track of the call for papers (CFPs) that you've submitted? Are you using messy spreadsheets?

Tracking your submitted sessions can be messy and complicated. If you're doing this as part of a team, managing those upcoming engagements can become increasingly difficult.

I'd like to introduce CFP Manager, a tool I created to manage the full speaker experience from before the event, after the event, and your next event. No more spreadsheets, no more guessing, just an overall improvement to your process. And the best part is that you can sign up and start using it for free.

Using Dot Notation to Query Nested Fields in MongoDB

April 28, 2026 Nic Raboy

If you're just starting to dabble with MongoDB, you've probably come to a point where your documents are looking a little complex. These documents might have gone from flat, relational-looking pieces of data to something with nested objects, nested arrays, and maybe even four or five more levels of nesting. So how do you query this data when it is a few layers deep?

In this short tutorial, we're going to look at dot notation within MongoDB and see how we can very quickly and easily filter our documents based on data that contains certain values in the nested fields.

Build a Movie Watchlist with Node.js, TypeScript, and MongoDB

April 13, 2026 Nic Raboy

Almost every modern web application will need a REST API for a client to talk to, and in almost every scenario, that client is going to expect JSON. The best developer experience is a stack where you can stay in JSON-shaped data end to end, without awkward transformations in the middle.

Take MongoDB, Express Framework, and Node.js as an example.

Express receives HTTP requests and sends responses. MongoDB sits in the middle and stores documents. The client can send JSON to your routes, your routes can send documents to MongoDB, and MongoDB can hand BSON back that maps naturally to what you serialize in the response. That works well because MongoDB is a document database. When you also want text search over fields like title and plot, MongoDB Search gives you a $search stage in an aggregation pipeline on the same cluster, so you are not bolting on a separate search system just to power a search box.

In this tutorial, we'll see how to build a small movie watchlist API using TypeScript and MongoDB. We'll explore a few different schema design opportunities and make use of MongoDB Search for full-text search.

Easy Automated Docker Volume Backups That Are Database Friendly

May 10, 2025 Nic Raboy

I recently picked up a Beelink EQR6 Mini PC to reduce some of the Docker stress on my aging Synology NAS. Since my Synology used the Btrfs filesystem, I never had to worry about file locks and corruption during a backup because that particular file system used copy-on-write (CoW). However, since I decided to use Ubuntu Server on my Mini PC and neglected choosing which filesystem I wanted to use, I ended up with ext4.

Here's the problem though.

The ext4 filesystem does not support copy-on-write. This means that if I tried to make backups of my Docker volumes, I'd run the risk of file corruption if those files were in use at the time of backup. This is particularly more of a problem with Docker volumes that contain SQLite databases with write-ahead log (WAL) or databases in general.

There's good news though! There are a few automated solutions for safe backups of Docker volumes that can be used with minimal effort.

Migrating Your Content Management System (CMS) Assets With MongoDB and Node.js

May 9, 2025 Nic Raboy

Content platforms evolve as business strategies shift. At MongoDB, we embraced external publishing platforms like Dev.to, Medium, The Polyglot Developer, etc. to better engage developer communities, requiring us to redistribute content while maintaining our existing CMS data in MongoDB.

To support our multi-platform publishing strategy, we created a system to publish content between our MongoDB CMS and external platforms. As a result, we needed to migrate the content we had in our CMS to its new home. The migration process included exporting the written content stored in MongoDB and downloading a copy of the media assets that were stored on third-party servers.

In this tutorial, we'll explore the export process to get the job done with as little friction as possible.