Category Archives: portland

conference, pdxpug, portland, postgres, postgresql, user groups

PostgreSQL Conference Fall 2007 – talk descriptions are up!

I just finished updating the Talks page for PostgreSQL Conference Fall 2007. There are so many great folks giving talks — Neil Conway, Josh Berkus, Robert Treat, David Fetter and Robert Hodges are all flying in. It’ll be great to see Josh, Robert and David again! I’m excited to meet Neil and Robert, both of whom I’ve heard great things about.

PDXPUG will be represented by Mark Wong and David Wheeler. Mark will be talking about performance, building on a talk he gave last year to PDXPUG on performance and TPC benchmarks. This conference talk will be focused on practical tools one can use with PostgreSQL. David’s talk will be about his recent work with Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL. David was kind enough to give PDXPUG’s very first talk, about PL/PgSQL.

We also have Webb Sprague from Eugene, OR coming out to talk about PostGIS. We’re hoping to get him out for user group meetings some time. Eugene is about two hours away from Portland, so we occasionally have visitors (hi Andrew!) to PDXPUG and PerlMongers from there. And of course Joshua Drake will be there.

Another great thing about having this conference at PSU is that members of the database reading group folks will be sure to attend. And our favorite relational algebra teachers will certainly be there.

As of today, we’ve almost filled up our event space! So if you haven’t registered yet, register now.

portland, xp

xppdx – dipping a toe in the water

I had a great time at an XP Programming/Code Sprint this evening arranged via the XP Portland mailing list. Without a clue as to what to expect, I showed up with my battered laptop, listened to three people present their ideas for projects to work on and picked one that seemed kanban-related (turned out yes!) to help out with.

Going back to my entry about the women’s programming group – our groups tonight had 100% participation because of the pairings. And there was no where to hide!

I think there’s a relationship between XP, socratic seminars (at least the way our group operated) and “pair and share” discussion (which is used quite a bit in middle and high school education). And by pairing people up, you very quickly discover how to compliment (or not!) each others strengths and weaknesses. I haven’t read anything about XP other than short articles on the web, but I really did not expect that at all.

Maybe that doesn’t work out for everyone, but tonight was fabulous. Thanks Kevin, Aaron, Arlo and Kim for all your help. And especially Jeff, who encouraged several of us to attend in the first place! It was so fun working together.

In two hours we had a tiny working application, putting data into an SQLite database using a GUI toolkit on three different operating systems. Sure, we need tests and documentation, but great work for just two hours and 7-8 people who mostly didn’t know each other.

I think that the group will be meeting in another two weeks, and I hope I can make it!