Monthly Archives: September 2012

postgresql

Wrapping up Postgres Open, new job, shift away from twitter

Last week in Chicago was amazing! 37 speakers, an incredible keynote by Jacob Kaplan-Moss (video coming soon!) and re-connecting with all the great people in Chicago. We announced a new conference committee for next year’s conference, and said we’d do it again in September in Chicago! That group is just getting started now, and will have some announcements for everyone in the coming weeks.

I’m going to be busy with a new job at Mozilla starting Monday, working on databases with the WebTools team.

Another small change is: I’m writing a few times a day to my tumblr and I’ve just stopped using twitter for the next few weeks. In the last day, I have really only thought about one or two things to share that would have been more than fleetingly useful. As I come across things, I’ll be sending them to the tumblr instead.

I’m also looking for patches and projects to work on for Postgres itself. During Thursday’s code sprint, I picked up an old patch for config directories, and today I spent some time re-generating a list of contributor names for the last 5 major versions of Postgres.

As usual, I feel so energized from hanging out with my favorite Postgres people. I’m only sad that I won’t see most of them in person again until next year.

feminism

Feminist reading: Creating a wiki page, reading

This will be a series of blog posts about the reading I’m doing about feminism.

Over the years, I’ve been given a list of books like the The Feminine Mystique, The Second Sex (Vintage), and most recently Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How to Use It.

I’ve read parts or all of those, and many other books. But I am still sitting here with a profound sense of dislocation about feminism. I don’t have a list of feminist philosophers or writers that I strongly identify with. I find a lot of the writing either polemical or overly academic. I would like to find the books and articles that I can identify with, learn from and share.

My first action is to create a wiki page with links to books and articles that I’m finding in a number of syllabi for introductory womens studies classes.

If you have a syllabus from a course you’ve taken that you can share with me, I’d love to see it.

The things I’ve read today include:

I am reflecting on all the readings, and if you’d like to join me in discussion, I’d love to have some discussion partners as I work through these texts.

postgresql 5 Comments

What features do developers get excited about in Postgres?

I’m here at DjangoCon in Washington, DC and thinking about what it is that developers are currently excited about in Postgres.

Postgres hackers are often very focused on solving our own problems, problems people bring up on our mailing lists and dealing with database scaling, replication and data management.

Developers using Postgres seem more interested in the features which make creating applications easier and removing complexity from architecture.

So, what are they interested in?

The features that I hear mentioned most often include:

(thanks to @ipmb for the list in a lightning talk today!)

What are the features you hear about from developers? Or if you’re a web developer, what are your favorite features in PostgreSQL?

postgresql, speaking 2 Comments

While we’re here, let’s fix computer science education: DjangoCon keynote and resources

My keynote today is done, the resources list is here and the slides are below. I wrote slightly different text to address our experience here in the US, but a mostly-complete transcript of the talk is here.

A ton of people came up to me after the talk and we started talking about all the ways that we might be able to solve problems. I created a mailing list for our first few discussions. If you are a person that doesn’t like google groups, contact me, as I of course can set up something that’s outside of that infrastructure if we have enough people who’d prefer a different place to have this conversation.

We have a plan to contact teachers in our local communities, and ask them what they need that we as open source software developers could help them with. And we all agreed that want to build things, but we’re pausing for a minute to ask the teachers around us what they need first.

For some background, the key bits of reading you should do to get up to speed are the following:
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