Heard of geekspeakr.com? Brenda Wallace is created a place to store the names and interesting details of women speakers for conferences.
I took a snapshot of the tag cloud so far:
Yay for PostgreSQL being the only database represented! 🙂 So far!
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!
By popular demand! Magus Hagander is working on a little script so that we can fill in names for everyone. You can also go to the flickr photo and indicate who you are now.
[ 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:
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. 🙂
Tomorrow I’ll post my thoughts on the second day of the conference, but for now I’d like to thank a few people who helped tremendously:
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.
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:
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!
We’re wrapping up all the little details for the conference:
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.
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.