I’m in Ottawa at PgCon and listening to Bruce Momjian give the keynote.
We have a few people who’ve joined Twitter in the last couple months and are posting their thoughts through the conference. Try following @crad, @fuzzychef, @franciscojunior and @selenamarie (me) for our up-to-the-minute updates!
I’ll be giving a lightning talk this afternoon around 5:30pm about user groups and PostgreSQL.
I’m still buzzing from BarCampPortland. I loved every minute of it, and managed to learn a ton from all the amazing people in Portland. I met a ton of new people, and started several more projects 🙂
Over the course of two days, I ran two sessions. The first was about PostgreSQL:
We had a fantastic discussion, totally filled the room up with people curious about what PostgreSQL can do. We had several requests for MySQL -> PostgreSQL “rosetta stone” documentation.
The second session was How to raise or eat chickens sustainably:
We had an incredible conversation – ranging from getting and raising chickens for the first time, to digging up your lawn and planting food, to gentrification, to obsessive local eating.
I also attended these others: DSLR, Bikes and Geeks Collide, Project Management, My Other Thing, Women in Tech, and a session at WordCamp.
I think it’s finally time to go to sleep. Check out a ton of pictures. Thanks so much everyone who attended, led sessions and volunteered this weekend!
There are lots of cool things about PostgreSQL, but one of my favorites is Joshua Tolley’s PL/LOLCODE implementation. He says he’s about to have more time to work on it, so watch out for updates.
In the meantime, I gave a presentation on lolcode to the Portland PerlMongers in April:
PDXPUG and USPgA are headed to LinuxFest NW in Bellingham, WA this weekend. We have a booth we’ll be staffing 9:30AM-5:00PM Saturday and 9:30AM-4:00PM Sunday. Mark Wong will be presenting ptop Saturday April 26th, at 10am in room Haskell-111. Don’t miss it!
Seems like a great lineup this year – tons of Drupal, how to use open source in your business, and ROBOTS!
Come meet us and find out more about PostgreSQL.
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: