Category Archives: conference

community, conference, oscon, pdxpug, pgconference, portland, postgres, postgresql , , , , , ,

Call for proposals for PDXPUG PgDay, due June 20, 2008

pgday 2007
(Photo from PgDay 2007)

Please submit a talk! The call will be open for 2 weeks and proposals are due June 20th. Follow the link for details on submitting.

http://pugs.postgresql.org/node/400

PDXPUG PgDay will be on July 20, 2008. This is a one-day conference happening the day before OSCON at the Oregon Convention Center.

We are inviting anyone who has something interesting to share about PostgreSQL to send us a proposal!

We’d like to have at least one 1.5 hour tutorial and up to five 45-minute talks.

We welcome talks in any of the following areas:

* Case studies involving interesting and innovative uses of PostgreSQL from an application developer, PostgreSQL developer or administrative user perspective
* Converting from other databases to PostgreSQL
* Howtos for database administration tasks (partitioning, backups, replication, writing stored procedures)
* Practical advice on configuration, monitoring and database management

community, conference, postgres, postgresql, user groups , , , , 1 Comment

PgCon 2008 – big announcements, community conversations

PgCon was a very exciting conference, with a lot of people from Europe, Asia, Australia and South America traveling to be part of it. I read that 175 people attended, and based on how crowded both parties were, it’s not hard to believe!

The biggest announcement for me was that the PostgreSQL Europe is finally a non-profit organization! I made a slide for my lightning talk with Magnus, Gabriele, Jean-Paul and Andreas on it:

PgEU announced

I got a ton of great feedback about the User Groupalooza slides. I also enjoyed meeting Jean-Paul Argudo, a fellow Drupaler.

There were a bunch of community-focused conversations, some focused inward on developers, some looking out to the rest of the world from inside Pg, and others from the outside looking in:

All the talks were recorded, so I look forward to listening to them again – without the distraction of Twitter! 🙂

A couple talks I thought were really great for web developers were:

  • Magnus Hagander’s search.postgresql.org talk gave some great examples and code showing how to use PostgreSQL’s tsearch capabilities with a PHP-based website.
  • Clark Evan’s talk on HTSQL, a REST-ful web inteface application. It looks pretty cool and I’m interested in trying it out. They are using it for medical records report generation and have even given the ability to generate queries to the end users.

Thanks so much to Dan who got me to the conference this year! I learned a lot, and really enjoyed meeting so many people that I’ve only communicated with over email for the past three years.

conference, open source, pgconference, postgres, postgresql, user groups , , , , , 2 Comments

PgCon Lightning talk: User Groupalooza

I gave a Lightning talk today about PostgreSQL User Groups. I wasn’t able to get through ALL my slides – but I only had to rush through the last three. (click on the cat below to download – 5MB)

splash for user group talk

Lightning talks are some of my favorite sessions. I got to announce the incorporation of PostgreSQL-EU! We had a talk about DBIx::Cache (which you should all check out!), a cool open source lab in Japan that Hiroshi Saito works for (only for Japanese, but very cool), Gavin Roy talked about Staplr and a new benchmarking tool called Playr that was just released on Thursday, and six more talks! We hope to publish the rest of the slides shortly.

conference, pgconference, postgres, postgresql, user groups , , , 1 Comment

PgCon in Ottawa – following people on twitter

I’m in Ottawa at PgCon and listening to Bruce Momjian give the keynote.

We have a few people who’ve joined Twitter in the last couple months and are posting their thoughts through the conference. Try following @crad, @fuzzychef, @franciscojunior and @selenamarie (me) for our up-to-the-minute updates!

I’ll be giving a lightning talk this afternoon around 5:30pm about user groups and PostgreSQL.

conference, postgres, postgresql , , , , , ,

Bar Camp Portland: what a weekend!

I’m inspired.

I’m still buzzing from BarCampPortland. I loved every minute of it, and managed to learn a ton from all the amazing people in Portland. I met a ton of new people, and started several more projects 🙂

Over the course of two days, I ran two sessions. The first was about PostgreSQL:

We had a fantastic discussion, totally filled the room up with people curious about what PostgreSQL can do. We had several requests for MySQL -> PostgreSQL “rosetta stone” documentation.

The second session was How to raise or eat chickens sustainably:

We had an incredible conversation – ranging from getting and raising chickens for the first time, to digging up your lawn and planting food, to gentrification, to obsessive local eating.

I also attended these others: DSLR, Bikes and Geeks Collide, Project Management, My Other Thing, Women in Tech, and a session at WordCamp.

I think it’s finally time to go to sleep. Check out a ton of pictures. Thanks so much everyone who attended, led sessions and volunteered this weekend!

conference, postgres, postgresql, USPA

Roadtrip to LinuxFest NW with PostgreSQL!

lfnw

PDXPUG and USPgA are headed to LinuxFest NW in Bellingham, WA this weekend. We have a booth we’ll be staffing 9:30AM-5:00PM Saturday and 9:30AM-4:00PM Sunday. Mark Wong will be presenting ptop Saturday April 26th, at 10am in room Haskell-111. Don’t miss it!

Seems like a great lineup this year – tons of Drupal, how to use open source in your business, and ROBOTS!

Come meet us and find out more about PostgreSQL.

conference , , , ,

lugradio live and emma hogbin

driving

I drove down to San Francisco yesterday with my co-presenter Andy for LugRadio Live USA 2008. Between presenting and booth duty, I was able to see Matthew Garrett give a fantastic talk about laptops and power management (and all the things that go wrong!), and Emma Hogbin give her talk, “Form an orderly queue, ladies.”

emma jane

I really enjoyed Emma’s presentation, and especially was impressed that women attendees made up more than half of her HICK Tech conference. It was an unexpected, and really inspiring achievement. She also mentioned geekspeakr.com, a great new service that Brenda Wallace set up for cataloging women speakers. I can’t wait for her talk at OSCON.

One of her main points was that increasing the number of female speakers at conferences – regardless of their marketability (my words, not hers) or geek-cred – was the key to increasing female attendance. Later on, she mentioned that she also had enlisted the help of a couple key matriarchs in the community to help ensure the participation from the community. Conference organizers should pay attention to what she’s done.

She knits. And she sews. With fabric that I love. So much that I made a pillowcase out using a piece of it:

pillowcase

I even made that pink piping myself!

This evening I had a great dinner at Out the Door in the Westfield center, and then spent a few hours hanging out at the Google after-party. Had a lovely evening. Finally time for a good night’s sleep!

conference, open source, pgconference, postgres, postgresql , , , , , 3 Comments

ptop – the talk

ptop slide1

Check out the slides from my ptop talk. I was very happy with the end result of the presentation. I had a few people talk to me about the project afterward, including the author of innotop, a perl-based monitoring tool for MySQL. I’m sure we can steal some ideas from that project!

I haven’t gotten much done with ptop since I’ve been back. I’ll have some time after LUG Radio Live!