postgresql

Wrapping up Postgres Open, new job, shift away from twitter

Last week in Chicago was amazing! 37 speakers, an incredible keynote by Jacob Kaplan-Moss (video coming soon!) and re-connecting with all the great people in Chicago. We announced a new conference committee for next year’s conference, and said we’d do it again in September in Chicago! That group is just getting started now, and will have some announcements for everyone in the coming weeks.

I’m going to be busy with a new job at Mozilla starting Monday, working on databases with the WebTools team.

Another small change is: I’m writing a few times a day to my tumblr and I’ve just stopped using twitter for the next few weeks. In the last day, I have really only thought about one or two things to share that would have been more than fleetingly useful. As I come across things, I’ll be sending them to the tumblr instead.

I’m also looking for patches and projects to work on for Postgres itself. During Thursday’s code sprint, I picked up an old patch for config directories, and today I spent some time re-generating a list of contributor names for the last 5 major versions of Postgres.

As usual, I feel so energized from hanging out with my favorite Postgres people. I’m only sad that I won’t see most of them in person again until next year.

feminism

Feminist reading: Creating a wiki page, reading

This will be a series of blog posts about the reading I’m doing about feminism.

Over the years, I’ve been given a list of books like the The Feminine Mystique, The Second Sex (Vintage), and most recently Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How to Use It.

I’ve read parts or all of those, and many other books. But I am still sitting here with a profound sense of dislocation about feminism. I don’t have a list of feminist philosophers or writers that I strongly identify with. I find a lot of the writing either polemical or overly academic. I would like to find the books and articles that I can identify with, learn from and share.

My first action is to create a wiki page with links to books and articles that I’m finding in a number of syllabi for introductory womens studies classes.

If you have a syllabus from a course you’ve taken that you can share with me, I’d love to see it.

The things I’ve read today include:

I am reflecting on all the readings, and if you’d like to join me in discussion, I’d love to have some discussion partners as I work through these texts.

postgresql 5 Comments

What features do developers get excited about in Postgres?

I’m here at DjangoCon in Washington, DC and thinking about what it is that developers are currently excited about in Postgres.

Postgres hackers are often very focused on solving our own problems, problems people bring up on our mailing lists and dealing with database scaling, replication and data management.

Developers using Postgres seem more interested in the features which make creating applications easier and removing complexity from architecture.

So, what are they interested in?

The features that I hear mentioned most often include:

(thanks to @ipmb for the list in a lightning talk today!)

What are the features you hear about from developers? Or if you’re a web developer, what are your favorite features in PostgreSQL?

postgresql, speaking 2 Comments

While we’re here, let’s fix computer science education: DjangoCon keynote and resources

My keynote today is done, the resources list is here and the slides are below. I wrote slightly different text to address our experience here in the US, but a mostly-complete transcript of the talk is here.

A ton of people came up to me after the talk and we started talking about all the ways that we might be able to solve problems. I created a mailing list for our first few discussions. If you are a person that doesn’t like google groups, contact me, as I of course can set up something that’s outside of that infrastructure if we have enough people who’d prefer a different place to have this conversation.

We have a plan to contact teachers in our local communities, and ask them what they need that we as open source software developers could help them with. And we all agreed that want to build things, but we’re pausing for a minute to ask the teachers around us what they need first.

For some background, the key bits of reading you should do to get up to speed are the following:
Continue reading →

conference, postgresql, speaking 5 Comments

FrOSCon: Mistakes were Made: Education Edition talk slides and notes

I just finished giving my keynote at FrOSCon, and am pasting the notes I spoke from below. This was meant to be read aloud, of course. Where it says [slide] in the text is where the slides advance.

Update: My slides are now available on the FrOSCon site.

FrOSCon – Mistakes Were Made: Education Edition

[slide]

Thank you so much for inviting me here to FrOSCon. This is my first time visiting Bonn, and my first time enjoying Kölsch. I enjoyed quite a lot last night at the social event.

Especially, I would like to thank Scotty and Holgar who picked me up at the train station, Inga who talked with me at length on Thursday night. All the volunteers who have done a terrific job making this conference happen. Thank you all so much for a wonderful experience, and for cooking all the food last night!

And I promised to show off the laser etching on my laptop I had done here by the local hackerspace. I come from the PostgreSQL community, so I got an elephant etched into the laptop. It only costs 10 euro and looks awesome.

[slide]

I’ve also made a page of resources for this talk. I’ll be quoting some facts and figures and this pirate pad has links to all the documents I quoted.

For those of you from countries other than Ireland, Great Britain, United States, German and Turkey – if you know where to get a copy of computer science curriculum standards for your country, please add a link. Right at the top of this pirate pad is a link to another pirate pad where we’re collecting links to curriculum standards.

[slide]

And finally, this talk is really a speech, without a lot of bullet points. So, the slides will hopefully be helpful and interesting, but occasionally I will be showing nothing on a slide as I speak. This is a feature, not a bug.

[slide]

For the past few years, I’ve been giving talks about mistakes, starting with problems I had keeping chickens alive in my backyard. Here’s a map of my failures. Scotty is familiar with the video that is online that tells the whole story of how all these chickens died.

Next, I talked about system administration failures – like what happens when a new sysadmin runs UNIX find commands to clean up — and delete all the zero length files, including devices, on a system. Or how to take down a data center with four network cables and spanning tree turned off. Here’s a tip: it really only takes first cable.
Continue reading →

conference 1 Comment

Europe’s open source advantage

I had this phrase “europe’s open source advantage” rolling around in my head Friday as I helped pack 1500 conference swag bags. We had a team of at least twelve people standing and seated in an assembly line for two hours to complete the task.

And this is what always happens at the volunteer-run free and open source conferences. I was told that somewhere around 70 volunteers would help out today, and it’s felt like easily twice that many people have been wandering around and pitching in today.

After we were done, the woman pictured above, brought conference-themed cookies that she bakes every year for the organizing team.

Attendance at FrOSCon is estimated at 1500. FOSDEM is estimated at about 5000. Chaos Communication Congress had an attendance of 4230 in 2008. All three are volunteer organized, focused on free software, and software freedom (although CCC is also about hacking, security and politics, many people I know go to 2 or more of these events).

FrOSCon has been around for seven years, inspired into creation by the organizer’s trip to FOSDEM, another terrific free and open source conference in Brussels, Belgium. What struck me at FOSDEM, is the same feeling I’m having here in Köln/Bonn.

It’s a privilege to be here. Organizers are excited and smiling and relaxed. Speakers feel obligation to take controversial positions — like I’ve heard more than once in the last 24 hours that “if you value freedom, you won’t buy Apple products.” Also: “What do I care about patents? I live in Europe.” And as I look around, I’m one of maybe 5% of people with a Mac laptop. (Far more people have iPhones.)

I think about our conferences in the USA, and we could learn some things. Both in terms of attendance and in terms of our vision. On the point of where exactly we are losing track of the activist spirit clearly on display here… maybe it has to do with our proximity to Silicon Valley, where I was recently told “charitable giving here is often in [the] form of angel investing.”

We don’t seem to feel an obligation to volunteer and create these large general, self-sustaining conferences. We certainly have large commercial conferences, and smaller generalist conferences. SCALE I think is one example of a community that’s created a sustainable community. And I’ve heard SE-LinuxFest is growing very quickly. So maybe we’re at a turning point?

I’m giving a keynote tomorrow about computer science education. What I’m really going to talk about is computational thinking. It’s a relentless decomposition of problems, algorithms for problem solving and the practical application of those ideas – in code or not.

That’s the kind thinking I believe leads some of us from “free as in freedom” for software to the value judgements about individual hardware purchases. Or, sometimes it leads us to find space in our communities for people who exist somewhere along the freedom spectrum. 🙂

I’ve had a chance to catch up with old friends, and make more than a few new ones. Mostly I’m looking forward to tonight’s BBQ, even if it rains. Henrik tells me that it’s what sets the whole tone for FrOSCon. People coming together to eat and drink and get to know one another over a shared feeling of belonging, out from behind their screens. And also to be openly critical of the ideas, organizations and products that threaten the foundations of free software.

postgresql , ,

Submissions for Lightning Talks for Postgres Open being accepted

By popular demand, we’re having a session of lightning talks at Postgres Open this year!

What is a lightning talk, you ask? It’s a 5-minute talk on a topic of your choosing. (For this conference, it should be at least vaguely postgres- or database-related.) Make it as serious or entertaining as you like. If you’ve never given a talk at a conference before, this is a great way to try it out. The audience is forgiving, and it’s only 5 minutes!

Slides are not required, but are helpful.

The session will be 5pm – 6pm on Tuesday, Sept 18. Sign up today!

There’s a limited number of spaces, so get your talks in now! 🙂

(Many thanks to Gabrielle for writing this blog post!)

(And psst – don’t forget to buy your tickets! 🙂

advice, womenintech , , , , 2 Comments

Giving back: “Career advice in less than 5 minutes”

Garann Means came up with this brilliant idea: give career advice about the big topics women in tech are facing IN LESS THAN 5 MINUTES.

So she started a gist to collect advice!

Have a look at the list of topics, and if you’ve got something to add do this:

  1. Make a short video
  2. Upload it to Vimeo
  3. Comment on the gist
  4. Tweet it out!
  5. Feel like the awesome mentor and contributor to the advancement of women in tech that you are!

Also, anyone have a good idea for a tag we should use?

I’m also collecting links to other resources.

Finally, I was talking with some people here in Portland about starting an advice column from respected recruiters and hiring managers. Would you submit a question? I’m thinking like Captain Awkward, but focused on issues women in tech face in looking for jobs, navigating a male-dominated working world, managing and hiring.

postgresql

LA Postgres first meeting is on for Tuesday, Aug 28!

The meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, August 28, at 7:30pm at 701 Santa Monica Blvd Suite 310, Santa Monica, CA.

From the latest posting on the Meetup group:

Beer and Stories

We huffed and we puffed and now we got beer at the meeting (thanks NewCars.com/Cars.com). Beers will be exchanged for interesting Posgres stories and facts you have so ya better brush on your favorite Postgres bits.

Here is a good resource for that: https://planet.postgresql.org/

Parking

NewCars.com/Cars.com is offering free parking which as we all is a precious resource in LA. Since its gated a volunteer will be there to meet you and let you in. Please get there on time as the volunteers who will be letting you in are also part of a Meetup and will not be available shortly after it starts. We will leave you phone numbers to call just in case. There is also fairly cheap parking right across the street at the library in case you need more parking.

Lightning Talks

There will be lightning talk sign up at Meetup and we will have various video connectors. Still if you know you are planning to give on let us know.

How to communicate with LA Postgres Organizers

Here are few ways I figured our you can reach us.

Twitter: @lapostgres
Email: lapostgres@webhippo.net
Freenode IRC: #lapostgres (http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=lapostgres&uio=MTE9MTIz7c)

See ya there!

postgresql , ,

Postgres Open 2012 schedule announced!

We’re pleased to announce the Postgres Open 2012 schedule!

A very special thanks to EnterpriseDB and Herkou for their Partner sponsorships. Please get in touch if you’d like to sponsor the conference this year!

Please see a list of our currently accepted talks and keynotes below:

  1. Keynote – Jacob Kaplan-Moss
  2. Deploying maximum HA architecture with Postgres by Denish Patel
  3. PostgreSQL Backup Strategies by Magnus Hagander
  4. PostgreSQL Access Controls (AuthN, AuthZ, Perms) by Stephen Frost
  5. Full-text search – seek and ye shall find by Dan Scott
  6. PostgreSQL When It's Not Your Job by Christophe Pettus
  7. Programming the SQL Way with Common Table Expressions by Bruce Momjian
  8. High Availability with PostgreSQL and Pacemaker by Shaun M. Thomas
  9. This Is PostGIS by Paul Ramsey with ?
  10. Super Jumbo Deluxe by Josh Berkus
  11. Using the PostgreSQL System Catalogs by Robert Haas
  12. Range Types in PostgreSQL 9.2 – Your Life Will Never Be the Same by Jonathan S. Katz
  13. DVDStore Benchmark and PostgreSQL by Jignesh Shah
  14. PG Extractor – A smarter pg_dump by Keith Fiske
  15. Performance Improvements in PostgreSQL 9.2 by Robert Haas
  16. Logging: Not Just for Lumberjacks by Gabrielle Roth
  17. Choosing a logical replication system: Slony vs Bucardo by David Christensen
  18. PostgreSQL on ZFS: Replication, Backup, and Human Disaster Recovery by Keith Paskett
  19. 12 Years of PostgreSQL in Critical Messaging by John Scott
  20. Embracing the Web with JSON and PLV8 by Will Leinweber
  21. Retail DDL by Andrew Dunstan
  22. An object oriented approach to data driven software development by David Benoit
  23. A Shared-nothing cluster system: Postgres-XC by Amit Khandekar
  24. Scaling out by distributing and replicating data in Postgres-XC by Ashutosh Bapat
  25. Disaster Recovery of PostgreSQL databases in Business Critical environments by Gabriele Bartolini
  26. Leveraging PLV8 in Javascript-heavy Web Applications by Taras Mitran
  27. PostgreSQL in the cloud: Theory and Practice by John Melesky
  28. Query Logging and Workload Analysis by Greg Smith
  29. A Batch of Commit Batching by Peter Geoghegan
  30. Large Scale MySQL Migration to PostgreSQL by Dimitri Fontaine
  31. Temporal Database Demo by Jeff Davis
  32. Performance Scaling Roadmap by Greg Smith
  33. Postgres is the new default – how we transitioned our platform at Engine Yard and why you should too by Ines Sombra
  34. How Akiban Implemented a New Database Compatible with the PostgreSQL Protocol by Ori Herrnstadt
  35. Scaling Postgres with some help from Redis by Josiah Carlson
  36. Lightning Talks by Gavin Roy

Stay tuned for our call for Lighting Talks.