Tomorrow I’ll post my thoughts on the second day of the conference, but for now I’d like to thank a few people who helped tremendously:

• The 6:30am Saturday morning volunteers: Andy, Stephen Frost, Lisa Drake, Melanie Lane, Andrew Dunstan, Jeff Davis, Jay Payne, Andrew Sullivan, Greg Smith (see comment), David Fetter, David’s friend Eric and Magnus Hagander. Those that saw me immediately after 2 hours of sleep – thank you for being charitable 🙂
• The videographers: Stephen Frost, Vivek Khera, Jan Wieck
• Greg Smith: for all your work on the schedule, and for writing the table definition for importing CSV-formatted PostgreSQL log files that I referenced in a Linux Magazine article about 8.3
• David Fetter: for putting up with having his “birthday” celebrated three or four times
• Magnus Hagander: for taking an incredible number of pictures. Please have a look at our photo pool on Flickr.
• EnterpriseDB: For sponsoring a fabulous dinner on Saturday night at the Greenbelt Jaspers (Magnus took some great photos).
• Dr. Louiqa Rashid for all her help with organizing the conference and keeping us on track and communicating with the UMD staff
• Pat Ipavich: Thank you for all of your research into campus facilities, and getting us the information we needed to make the conference run smoothly.
• Dr. Katherine Bartol, Yixin Qiu for sharing their research and insights about women in open source with a group of 12 people on Saturday night
• Lisa Drake: for volunteering to staff the reception desk most of Saturday and Sunday.
• The University of Maryland at College Park: the staff were extremely accommodating, helpful and helped make everyone comfortable and happy. Your campus and buildings are beautiful!
• Dan Langille: Thank you for taking the initiative and setting up tables, fixing broken video cables and being our ear in the IRC channel during the morning panel. You did so many other things to help us, and Joshua and I both very much appreciate it. Dan is running his own conference in May – PGCon.
• John Rogelstad for bringing me lunch on Saturday 🙂
• Bruce Momjian: Thanks for the fantastic tour of DC last night – including the creative driving 🙂 There are many, many more things to thank Bruce for — that will need to be another post!
• Andrew Sullivan: for pointing out an important bug in ptop
• The brave MySQL guy Baron Schwartz: who asked the question: What does PostgreSQL have to offer me? I hope we gave a good answer.
• Rob Wultsch: for driving a bunch of tourists around last night and surviving.
• Thank you to all of our sponsors: Afilias, Command Prompt,Continuent, EnterpriseDB, Sun Microsystems, Truviso, xTuple, Open Technology Group, and Emma. I don’t think it overstates things to say that your support of conferences like these ensures the future of open source!
• Finally, thank you Joshua Drake and Commandprompt. We could not have had this conference without all of your time and effort!

If you know of other people that were there, or you were with us at 6:30am and I forgot to thank you, please email me. Especially if I did not get your business card!!

Josh and I were so exhausted at the end! I am so happy with the results — getting to meet with Bruce, Magnus and Jan was incredible. Also, I truly enjoyed chatting with people, hearing about potential PostgreSQL User Groups in Philly, New York, Virginia and the start of a Washington DC-area PUG sponsored by OmniTi – meetings will be on the second Wednesday of the month.

I heard that there is a Russian PostgreSQL Users Group in Moscow — their first meeting drew 30 people, and they are presenting a number of talks at a conference called RIT (Russian Internet Technologies), expected to draw 1000+ people to Moscow.

So many other things that I need to write down soon – but now I have to pack and get on the plane. Stay in touch, everyone!