Frontend engineer shares MongoDB backend

Short summary

A frontend developer learning backend shares concrete lessons from building with MongoDB: schema decisions should hinge on access patterns and growth potential, not logical grouping. Skip-based pagination degrades at scale—MongoDB reads then discards documents with each deep page. Understanding these tradeoffs prevents expensive refactors.

• •Embedding vs referencing depends on access patterns and document growth, not data relationships
• •Skip-based pagination performance degrades linearly with page depth; understand costs at scale
• •Backend design requires thinking about data growth and query patterns from day one

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