Category Archives: community

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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!

gender, open source, pgconference, postgres, postgresql, women, womenintech , , , , , , , , 7 Comments

Women Who Code – where are they?

[ I was working on a blog post about the Women In Open Source roundtable I ran, and then Brenda Wallace tweeted: “it seems reasonably easy 2 get women involved in opensource documentation, ui design, and even management. Why is it hard 2 get women coding?” Here’s my longer response, mostly with ideas I got from the roundtable. ]

I ran a panel discussion about Women in Open Source at the PostgreSQL Conference East (last weekend). I talked about all the conference events that I’d seen in the last 1-2 years specific to women, and a pair of researchers talked about communication patterns among women on the KDE women’s list. Then we had a 2 hour discussion with the 10 people in attendance.

Three issues that stuck with me from the discussion were:

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PostgreSQL Conference – Keynote commentary

Theo Schlossnagle wrote a great blog post about Joshua Drake’s keynote. I wanted to respond to some of his comments here.

I totally agree with Theo that we need to be disruptive! One criticism I have had in the past of the PostgreSQL community is that it has been too centralized, and not willing to experiment with social networking, wikis and other non-hierarchical tools that will get more *end* *users* actively contributing.

I think all of that is changing with the creation of the PostgreSQL-EU and USPgA groups, and the fast uptake in PostgreSQL User Groups in the last few months.

Also, I also respectfully disagree with some comments that were made in other sessions about “us not wanting” the type of users that choose MySQL. *I* want those users to come to my user group meetings. There’s tons we can learn from each other.

We will make PostgreSQL better if we hear and respond directly to criticism from users of the most popular open source database. I’m not saying that Tom Lane and Bruce Momjian need to do that. PUGs should be doing this, filtering out the good/important stuff and communicating information back to -hackers and -core. That’s a great service the user groups can provide to postgresql.org.

Finally, I am so excited about a Baltimore/Washington PUG!! I had several people approach me about a group. I think even the MySQL guy will be interested. 🙂

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

PostgreSQL Conference Day 1

I just got home from the EnterpriseDB party at Jasper’s. What a fantastic day at the conference!

I attended most of Brent Friedman’s Java and PostgreSQL talk. I do a little Java hacking for a legacy app, so the sysadmin-ish details about installation and upgrading were useful as I look forward to upgrading.

Andrew Sullivan

I really, really enjoyed Andrew Sullivan’s talk on Rapid Development as Denial of Service Attack. Not only is Andrew witty and sharp, he just nailed the people problems that are inherent in modern software design. I really liked his presentation style as well – tons of useful analogies. Some key bits:

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PostgreSQL Conference East Flickr group

DSC_0051.JPG

I created a Flickr group for the conference and added a few pictures today.

The weather in Maryland is just like Portland this week! Kind of drizzly and overcast. The sun peeked out for a few minutes at sunset, and I had a nice walk around the University of Maryland at College Park campus today.

I met several people in the UMIACS department, including my new hero, Mike, who created over 100 individual wireless network accounts for conference attendees. The rooms look great, and the foyer where we’ll be having breakfast is very pretty. UMD’s campus is just amazing and huge. If you’ve got an extra hour to spare, take a walk around!

conference, pgconference, postgres, postgresql, user groups, USPA , ,

PostgreSQL Conference East – this Saturday and Sunday

We’re wrapping up all the little details for the conference:

  • Wireless access is secured! Each person will have their own account. You’ll receive it when you register.
  • Our final schedule is available!
  • The last few talks have been rolling in. I’m very excited about the round table Sunday morning with Joshua Drake (USPA and PostgreSQL SPI Liaison), Bruce Momjian (PostgreSQL Core) and Magnus Hagander (PostgreSQL-EU). Bring some questions! We’ll be on IRC taking remote questions as well.
  • I’ll be giving a talk on ptop Sunday too!
  • Also very excited to get together with other Women In Open Source!

We’re all getting together at the Greenbelt Chevy’s on Friday night. Let me know if you’d like to join. I’ve made a reservation for 20.

pgconference, postgres, postgresql 1 Comment

PostgreSQL Conference East – buckets of awesome!

We’re gearing up for PostgreSQL Conference East!

Slides are coming in, food’s been ordered, and we’re working out the final details of the space and recording. One of our committee members has a few digital cameras, so we’re hoping to record video in all three rooms.

Reading through the slides, I’m very excited to see Portland-local Jeff Davis’ talks on his work with the Ruby PostgreSQL driver, and a more general talk on Logic and Databases. Jeff has been a fixture at PDXPUG, and I’m happy he’s able to come out for the conference.

David Fetter is giving a crowd favorite, A Flock of PLs. And Michael Bryzek looks to be giving an simple and elegant talk explaining how to solve a common queuing problem for web application developers.

If you’re from the DC area, please suggest fun things to do while we’re in town (May 29-30). Especially good places to eat near the University of Maryland at College Park.