We toured the Schonbrunn Castle (and decided not to tour the gardens). Any photography inside is strictly prohibited, which felt surprisingly good 🙂 – we could focus on looking at the rooms!
Trying To Beat The Cold Weather In Vienna
Month: September 2022
More Travel
Thinking about this week in Spring when we had both Nordic PG Day and PG Day Paris, I can feel the difference – there was too much travel for me this time! I didn’t need to travel anywhere for Nordic because I was already in Helsinki, and there was a one-day gap between Nordic and Paris. And now, I had to travel to Amsterdam and then skip a part of Uptime to travel to Vienna. And I was so tired! I will never do it again! Probably, I should have just traveled to Amsterdam directly from Chicago.
The PG Day Austria went really well. Although there was no emerging dessert table, the conference venue was splendid, and the talks were great.
More On Amsterdam And Uptime
Both conferences’ schedules were packed, and there was not enough time to see the cities where the conferences took place. It was fine for Amsterdam because we visited it more than once, and also, we had several free hours on the day of arrival. We walked around, bought some souvenirs, and tried to find where we stayed in July 2019. I can’t believe it was a little bit over two years ago – it feels like another epoch.
Uptime 2022
Pictures from the conference
Uptime 2022 by Aiven was the best-organized conference I ever attended! all the talks I attended were very interesting, my only two regrets are that 1) I could not attend two tracks at the same time and 2) I had to leave earlier to attend PG Day Austria.
The recordings of the presentations will be available soon, and here are some of the pictures I took during the event.
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Hotel Jakarta in Amsterdam
For this conference, the organizers booked the rooms for speakers at Hotel Jakarta, which is located very close to the conference venue. It’s the most unusual hotel I ever stayed!
Helsinki
I was in Helsinki for only one and a half days. On the first (half) of the day, I visited Natasha at her home and met with the whole family – the last time I saw everybody was in March!
This time, the situation in the world (and on the war front) was different, so our conversation was much happier, even in view of the European energy crisis.
On the second day, I did some work, mostly interacting with our London-based team, and then Boris and I biked to IKEA – something he had wanted to do for a while. He already made a couple of solo biking tips there, and he wanted to do it with me as well. We declared a late lunch to be our primary purpose, but it is impossible not to browse what’s out there!
On Tuesday, we had a very early flight to Amsterdam. Since Boris has Finnair Gold, we could hang out in the Finnair lounge and have breakfast there (and I forgot to take pictures :)).
Also, I upgraded us to Finnair Plus, so we had these cool seats with lights and elevated leg rests 🙂
The Climate Quartet by Maja Lunde
I read the third book of the Climate Quartet first, unaware of the previous two, and then came back to read the Life of Bees and the End of the Ocean.
All three of the books impressed me greatly. How Maja Lunde draws connections between what happens here and now in today’s world and what can happen in the near future due to today’s actions is incredibly convincing.
I can’t think of a better way to explain how we, the people of the planet Earth, can impact our nearest future, not on what will happen many generations ahead, but on what could happen to our children.
Happy
I can’t even remotely describe how happy I am with the development the war is taking at the moment. I am afraid to jink it, but God, how great it feels!
And how happy it makes me feel that I know that my “two cents” are a part of this development! I know it was more symbolic than anything else that I wanted to give money to the defense of Ukraine in addition to the humanitarian relief, but still, it feels incredibly good.
And also… it is historically funny how the language of the Russian propaganda these days not even resembles but cites the old Soviet-times play The Dragon by Eugeny Schwartz.
And I will stop for now 🙂
Saying Goodbye to EDB
From my professional blog
Friday, September 2, was my last day with EDB. Although I was a part of EDB for less than a year, it seemed like a whole epoch in my professional career. Those were the months of continuous learning and professional growth unmatchable to anything I had before.
However, the most important and valuable experience was connecting with amazing people who make EDB a unique place to work. Many of my co-workers spent hours answering my never-ending questions and helping me to feel more comfortable in the unfamiliar areas of PostgreSQL (and trust me, it’s not like I knew everything!)
When I came to EDB in December 2021, I already knew many of my co-workers, but I met even more people during my tenure.
To all of the EDB family – THANK YOU!
And please, stay in touch!
My New Job
I was quiet about starting a new job jet another time. It sounds so millennial to have four jobs in the course of fifteen months, but I can’t say I made mistakes.
I spoke at length about my last two job changes, why I decided to leave Braviant and join BorkerX, and why I left after being there for only five months.
I was very excited to join EDB for a number of reasons. I moved to a non-abusive environment where everybody treated me with respect. I worked in one company with the best people from the Postgres community. For the first time in my life, I was in a truly international company that accumulated the best talents from all over the world. I could Slack Postgres contributors any time:). I learned new things each and single day.
Still, I knew from my first day at EDB that I won’t stay there forever. There was a reason why I resisted the offers from EDB and 2nd Quadrant for so many years. I genuinely loved the people who worked there and admired their work all that time. But I knew I didn’t want to do consulting, and I was not good at product development. I needed to see the material impact of my work; I didn’t enjoy giving advice and not knowing whether they were used and whether things worked how I thought they should.
I was (and still am) very thankful for the opportunity to work at EDB, and I thought I should stay there at least for a year to reciprocate. But then, all of a sudden, there was an email that started the conversation. At first, I ignored it. They were persistent. Reluctantly, I started to talk, but it was too soon; I had been at EDB for less than five months.
The company offered more money than I was making in EDB, but I would never go just for money alone. During our first conversation, I said it was not interesting for me to do the work I was offered to do, and we partied. I felt good that I didn’t go for more money but not interesting work. But a month later, a miracle happened: the same company offered me a dream position, allowing me to do all the things I dreamed about.
The process was long. I met and talked with many people from different departments, and after each conversation, I was more and more excited about this opportunity. There were so many things I could do, and I could do it right, and people wanted me to do it right!
It’s only four days that I am with my new company, but I am already over the moon. At this moment, I am on my way to Europe – my company acknowledges all my previous speaking commitments, and I will be presenting in Amsterdam, Vienna, and then New York.
Hettie's Reflections 