I’ve got a post about Heikki’s visibility map talk in the queue, but first I’ll post the updated slides for the user groups talk — Leading without being in charge.
Enjoy!
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Category Archives: community
Simon Riggs just rocked my world.
I’m in Brussels for the FOSDEM conference, hanging out at the PostgreSQL booth, meeting my European colleagues, and running into friends.
PostgreSQL has a developer’s room and Simon Riggs just wrapped up a talk about Replication. I sincerely hope that the video of the talk turned out well, because it was the most inspiring and technically interesting talk I have seen in a very long time. Unfortunately, I don’t have a copy of the slides at the moment, but word is that they will be posted on the BSD wiki soon.
Simon focused on new features in 8.4 that affect file-based replication, also mentioning streaming, synchronous replication — which will not be included in 8.4, but is being actively worked on. He explained his rationale for objecting to the inclusion of the synchronous replication patches, mostly, I think, based on the complexity of the WAL archiving required as it was implemented.
Then, Simon launched into an in-depth tour of the issues and solutions brought about during his team’s work on Hot Standby. Hot Standby allows read-only queries to be made against a file-based replication enabled Postgres server, known as Point-in-time recovery and WAL Shipping in the Postgres documentation.
Simon started work on PITR-related patches about five years ago, and continues that work with others today.
One fascinating aspect of the hot standby patches is that they ultimately caused performance improvements in sub-transactions across the board – and will likely cause up to 5% improvement in that code path. There were other performance improvements, but I’ll wait for the slides to mention those. At several times during the talk, Simon pointed out features that Postgres has that no other database has — such as multiple options for dealing with conflicts in hot standby (freezing, conflict resolution and timeout).
At the end of the talk, Simon spent a few minutes talking about how Postgres is capable of being the best database, not just the best open source database. And how all the people in the room were capable of contributing as he had. He claimed that prioritization and aiming to work on the biggest, most interesting problem you can are all you need. And he claimed that all that made him different was that he was a little more persistent about solving problems.
Rock on, Simon.
What are you waiting for? Get your PgCon talks in now!
Yes, that’s me, with Tom Lane. You, too, might be able to get your picture with Tom!
Like Josh Berkus said yesterday:
As of today, you have 2 weeks left to submit talk proposals to PGCon.
You know you want to. PGCon is the international conference for PostgreSQL hackers, sysadmins, application developers, SQL geeks and other Smart People. Submit your talk! Be a Smart Person too!
PGCon will be happening May 21-22 in Ottawa, Canada, with tutorials on May 19 and 20. Some financial help is often available for speakers, but none is available for non-speakers. So submit, submit!
We particularly could use some talks on the new 8.4 features, really creative PostgreSQL applications, massive Postgres scaling, PostGIS, BioPostgres, and a few case studies. This means you.
I attended PgCon last year for the first time. Not only were the presentations top notch, but Dan Langille‘s hospitality set the groundwork for yet another fantastic community-building experience PostgreSQL community members experienced during the 2006 Anniversary summit in Toronto, again in 2007 at the first PgCon.
We had plenty of outstanding socializing and hacking opportunities. Last year’s conference started with a gathering of committers that was fodder for great pub and hallway track conversation all week. Great talks I saw included Andrew Sullivan’s Idle thoughts on PostgreSQL Project Management, Greg Sabino Mullane’s Bucardo talk about this multi-master replication tool, and Magnus Hagander’s walk through how search.postgresql.org was implemented.
Ottawa was beautiful last year, and I can’t wait to go back this May!
meme: Current state of me
Audrey started a meme that I liked – so here’s my answers:
- Did I earn a living? Yes, I did. I’ve never been happier with my work, who I work with and who I work for. I surprised myself a little with a job change that has me working at home, and co-working at various places in Portland. I find myself jumping out of bed every morning, excited to start my work day, and attending amazing geek events 2-3 times a week. (shameful Portland tech scene junkie confession!)
- Was I able to incubate new ideas? Well, I was certainly *exposed* to tons of creative, exciting ideas, and felt energized to participate and organize in ways that I did not in 2007. As far as generating my own ideas, I think I was in the same boat as Audrey — spending a ton of time *doing*, but not as much time reflecting on experiences. The one exception to that was my vacation last August in Mexico. I took nearly three weeks to unwind from work, and I spent that time learning a little Spanish, and taking photographs that I was very proud of. Looking out to next year, I can’t wait to see what happens, and feel like I won’t be able to avoid an explosion of creativity.
- Did I grow in ways that I wanted? YES. OMG. I had an incredible year, personally and professionally. I organized two PostgreSQL conferences – one in Maryland! – and helped get new user group leaders started with groups in at least five new locations. I’ve seen several long-time community members step up, join boards and become more active in the core community building work I championed. I met Tom Lane. I stood by as close friends, inspired by a growing community, started their own projects. I was inspired over and over again by the humor, grace and intelligence of the people who make PostgreSQL happen. I contributed code, presented nearly a dozen talks and traveled.
So, 2009 will be a lot about co-chairing Open Source Bridge, with a big helping of PostgreSQL community work, primarily speaking about the filesystem performance testing we’re doing here in Portland, and hopefully a bit more about user groups. I’m looking forward to a great work year, with a company that continues to be successful in a difficult time, and with coworkers that make me laugh every day.
I’m looking to Portland to inspire me: with cool ideas, exciting companies and a vibrant tech scene.
Your turn!
A year of PDXPUG
Last year was the third year that PDXPUG has been operating in Portland, and I decided to look back at our year of meetings. Here goes:
January 11 – 10 things you can use in PostgreSQL 8.3
February 26 – Extreme Database Makeover: RT
March 20 – Managing Internet Services: Using the right tool for the job
April 17 – Rails on PostgreSQL
May 15 – PostgreSQL for Pythoneers
June 19 – The relational model
July 20 – PDXPUG DAY!, and the schedule
August 21 – Tsearch2 and Materialized Views (Guest speaker from Seattle!!)
September 18 – The Visual Planner
October 16 – Point In Time Recovery
November 20 – Reviewed 8.4 features with the help of depesz’s blog
December – Coder’s Social
Thanks everyone who gave talks and attended meetings! User groups are only as good as the people who participate in them, and this list shows just how talented, diverse and fun the Postgres community is in Portland. I love you guys!
Looking forward – once again, we’ve already scheduled talks through the next four months! I feel like the group is running on its own momentum, and that is a fabulous feeling. We have a data visualization talk, another Extreme Database Makeover, and hopefully a presentation about teaching database theory with PostgreSQL.
Our next meeting is on January 15, 7pm with Stephen Jazdzewski traveling all the way from Eugene to present SplendidCRM, a formerly Microsoft SQL-only system that is now compatible with PostgreSQL. I am happy to see more of our Microsoft colleagues joining and presenting to the user group communities, as I’ve always felt they are underrepresented in our groups. Also, I’m happy to host another out-of-town presenter here in Portland! Hope to see you on the 15th.
Open Source Bridge
There’s going to be a new conference in Portland next July.
We’re calling it Open Source Bridge.
Our goal is this:
Create a completely volunteer-run, community conference to connect developers working with open source.
Let me explain with a little background:
My first tech conference was LISA in San Diego in 1997. I ran into Linus Torvalds in the hallway with my friend Steve, and we were both star-struck. I was still a student at the time, and loved every minute I spent rubbing elbows with people that were the pop-stars of the UNIXy world.
Since then, I attended LISA a few more times, OSCON, countless user group meetings for Perl, PostgreSQL. The last two years have been filled with local unconferences (BarCampPortland and WhereCampPDX to name just two) and travel to incredible community conferences like PgCon, LUG Radio Live, SCALE, Northwest Linux Fest, the Linux Plumbers Conference and last weekend’s Mentor Summit. And while on the board of the Legion of Tech, I’ve met and connected with more people than I ever thought I could know in Portland.
I love conferences. And I love Portland. Maybe you can guess what’s coming next.
During an intense brainstorming session at Side Project To Startup, a group of concerned Portlanders drew together a plan for a new conference. We packed a tiny room, and had a heated discussion about what we wanted, what Portland needed, and how we might do it. By the end of the session, Audrey Eschright and I agreed to co-chair. And with the support of Portland’s incredible tech community, we knew we could make it happen.
We called a few people, and I invited everyone over to talk about what to do next. We were: Audrey, Reid Beels, Professor Bart Massey, Rick Turoczy, Jake Kuramoto, Dawn Foster, Kelly Guimont, Adam Duvander.
We looked at the giant pieces of paper we’d scribbled notes on a few weeks before, and ate dinner together on a warm fall evening. And we decided to have a Town Hall.
Since then, we’ve been joined by Ward Cunningham (AboutUs), Irene Schwarting (Companies By Design), Harvey Mathews (SAO) and Clay Neal (City of Portland).
But enough with the history lesson!
Open Source Bridge will bring together the diverse tech communities of the greater Portland area and showcase our unique and thriving open source environment.
Open Source Bridge will have curated, discussion-focused conference sessions, mini-conferences for critical topics and will include unconference sessions.
We will show how well Portland does open source and share our best practices for development, community and connectedness with the rest of the world.
Lots of ideas are buzzing around in our heads, and we’d love to talk about them with you! If you’d like to contribute to the effort, stop by the town hall event October 30, 2008 at Cubespace. We’ll have another meeting November 6th, and it will be announced on Calagator.
At the town hall, you’ll have a chance to meet the members of the core organizing committee, and pick up a responsibility or two. We’ll be breaking off into teams for each of the major areas requiring organization, and distributing the work across many people. We will create a mailing list after this first meeting for those who just want to hear about what we’re up to, or participate in some other way.
Thanks for your interest, and we hope to see you tomorrow night!
Mentor Summit Report for PostgreSQL
Update: Fixed the etherboot wiki link.
I attended the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit this past weekend on behalf of PostgreSQL. We met at the Google campus in Mountain View.
This event was an unconference and so, none of the sessions were determined in advance.
Some of the highlights were:
- Leslie Hawthorn and Chris DiBona went into some detail with the whole group about the selection process for GSOC. This session made me feel as though PostgreSQL had relatively good chances for being accepted again next year. Google, however, does not pre-announce projects/products, so there is no sure thing about our (or any other project’s) involvement.
- I met MusicBrainz guys and was pleased to receive many bars of chocolate they requested to be distributed to SFPUG and PDXPUG members as thanks for making an great database.
- Attended three sessions concerning recruitment and retention of students. This is a topic that many people were interested in, but that few people feel they have a proper strategy for.
I also led a session on recruitment and retention of students to open source projects. Some of the ideas that came out of that and the related sessions were:
- Determine what makes you personally need to be part of Postgres (joy of learning, scratching a technical itch, making a tool for your job, fame). Find out which of those things your student also needs or wants and try to give that or help your student achieve that thing.
- Have a clearly defined method for students to keep journals. Several projects simply used MediaWiki and templates.
- Use git (or other distributed revision control), and have students commit early and often to a branch that mentors have access to.
- The Etherboot project has a great system: http://etherboot.org/wiki/soc/2008/start
- Hold weekly meetings over IRC. These can be brief, but help get students accustomed to your project’s culture and way of doing things.
- Ask the student: “are you on track?”, ask the mentor: “do you think the student is on track?” on a weekly basis
- If you want students to stick around, find incremental responsibilities to assign that are driven by their enthusiasm.
- Interview on the phone all your students ahead of time, not just the ones you think might be a problem.
- Require a phone number on the application for the student.
- Require a secondary contact so that if the student “disappears” there’s a backup person to contact. (and contact that person BEFORE SoC starts)
I made good connections with members of Git, Parrot, WorldForge, Ruby and many other community leaders. I was particularly impressed by the ideas and stories from the current Debian project leader, Steve McIntyre and Gentoo council member Donnie Berkholz. Donnie recommended some books about recruitment that I plan to read and review in the next few weeks.
The issue of mailing list moderation and the number of people required to keep mailing lists functioning properly came up frequently. If you know a moderator for a Postgres mailing list, please consider thanking them for doing a very tedious, extremely important and often thankless job.
I also spent some time discussing with Leslie Hawthorn and Cat Allman how to increase the total number of women mentors and students next year. Leslie and I shared some ideas and I offered to help implement them next year. One thing the crowd asked for was explicit training on how to recruit and manage female students. Realistically, this information will apply to all students, and I hope this training helps us recruit more students overall.
I thought the conference went quite well. I hope PostgreSQL is accepted next year, and that one of our mentors is able to attend this conference. And, if you go, be sure to register for the hotel early, and stay at the Wild Palms.
PgDay EU – Best conference ever?
Smiling, PostgreSQL-using conference goers
Anyone who went will likely tell you how much they enjoyed PGDay EU 2008. My biggest regret this year is that I was unable to attend.
Magnus Hagander’s Planet blog is still missing, so I’m blogging the link to his fabulous photos for him. If you see any pictures with missing names or labels, please let him know at magnus -at- hagander (dot) net.
This conference was once again led by Gabriele Bartolini, and a large supporting team – including the other board members of PgEU – Magnus Hagander, Jean-Paul Argudo and Andreas Scherbaum. PgEU (for those that don’t know) is a non-profit dedicated to promoting PostgreSQL in European nations. Next year, this conference will be held somewhere in France! Stay tuned to planet.postgresql.org for details!
Update:
My favorite photo:
October is a month of many conferences
I just blogged about WhereCampPDX, and am enjoying a few days of quiet before heading out to Google for the Summer of Code Mentor’s summit this coming weekend.
I was so busy I didn’t have much time to blog about the PostgreSQL Conference West. It was great to see everyone, and I came away more sure than ever that PostgreSQL has the best developer and user community. We had so much fun, and I really enjoyed seeing the creative ways people are using PostgreSQL – for business (Proprietary to PostgreSQL), education (Visual Planner) and as a hobby (PL/LOLCODE).
WhereCampPDX was amazing! I had a couple fantastic conversations with Webb Sprague, a regular PostGIS presenter for PDXPUG and Portland PostgreSQL conferences. He’s interested in getting people together to talk about anthropology and tech, and how to better meet the needs of the people who will actually end up using disaster management software in a crisis. Look for a fabulous event from him this spring!
As far as GSOC, I’m hoping to take a lead role in this next year with Josh Berkus‘ help. He’s managed Summer of Code for at least two years, and has worked hard to match mentors and students, and we’ve ended up with several excellent contributions.
My plan for PostgreSQL is to start early on recruitment and project proposals, so that we have an excellent turnout next year. So, if you know of a project you want worked on, or know of students who would be good candidates – let’s get in touch now and start recruiting!
PostgreSQL Conference: Friday night dinner
How to have fun, PostgreSQL-style
Those of you in town on Friday evening are welcome to join us at Paddy’s at 6pm for dinner:
Paddy’s Bar & Grill
65 SW Yamhill St
Portland, OR 97204
The reservation is under ‘Selena’, and we’ll be sitting in the front. The MAX runs directly in front of the restaurant.
Food is good – vegetarian-friendly, but not necessarily vegan or gluten-free. Those looking for those types of food options, let me know – there are actually excellent places nearby to eat, and you could join us a little later for socializing after a proper meal.
I’ll be directing those that want dinner at the Code Sprint over there – so I asked for 20 seats. Please comment or email me if you plan to attend, so that I can ask for more space if we fill up.
This isn’t a sponsored dinner – so we’ll all go dutch, unless a generous member of a company would like to sponsor us 🙂
I imagine several members of PDXPUG will be there. Can’t wait to see you all!