Category: professional

PG Conf EU: Days 1 and 2

I do not have a spare minute at the conference, but what a difference between last year and this year! I do not need to run around nervously; I talk to everyone about the conference proposal submissions and sponsorship. On Tuesday, I led the Postgres Standard discussion, and we had an amazingly productive session.

We had an afternoon free (I didn’t need to do anything during the afternoon sessions), so Boris and I went to see all the “required attractions.” I believe I already mentioned that Riga is my least favorite city among all the Baltic cities, and in addition, I have some complicated personal history with it. Also, the wind was brutal, and it felt even colder than it was. I made two more attempts to buy a warmer coat, both without any result. Surprisingly, I felt OK in my very old coat, and hopefully, I will be able to manage for the rest of my stay (or I will finally find something!)

A shopping center where I didn’t find what I was looking for
Freedom Statue, which survived all regime changes
The old mot
The only fortress tower that survived
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We Just Turned One!

Yesterday was exactly one year since Dian, Anna, and I incorporated Prairie Postgres NFP. Never in my wildest dreams could I imagine myself being a founder of a not-for-profit, and even less could I imagine how it would change my life and shift my priorities.

We celebrated in the best possible way – the Illinois Prairie Postgres meetup attendance skyrocketed (I think we had more than forty attendees). We had long, deep, and engaging conversations, and we had cake!

Tampere City Hall Reception

Tampere City Hall visit was an absolutely new experience for me, and I wish I took more pictures! The best part was that we could walk arond the whole building, not just a reception hall. Imagine you visit a museum, and you are allowed to sit on all of these beautiful chairs, and come close to these timy wooden tables, and touch the cabinets and vases, and feel it all like a liveable space!

As for the reception itself, the information about it was misleading. The conference program said that we will have this city walk, which will end with the “event” in the city hall. Boris, who should have some visibility into the details said that “there should be food”.

The event started at 7 PM, and all guests were offered champaign flutes upon arriving the the reception hall, and then there were individual plates with four pieces of appetizers (I didn’t realized that I should have taken picture of them, because I thought there will be something else, but that was it :)). The Mayor of Tampere greeted the conference and delivered a short speech about the importance of data technologies, etc; then the trio of musicians was performing something with people keeping talking, and that was it. My point is that they didn’t have to feed us, but the event ended at 8:30 PM, and it was nine by the time we reached the hotel, and it was too late to look for any other food (the hotel kitchen closes at 9 PM, and I didn’t want to go out and wait anywhere for anything ).

I survived, because Boris saved an apple for me, and because we had hot chocolate packs in the room, and I didn’t really need that much, but it was definitely a planning problem 😂.

Continue reading “Tampere City Hall Reception” →

Code And Coffee

Sunday was packed with activities: in addition to Bike the Drive, it was the day of the monthly Chicago Code and Coffee meetup. I’ve been there before, and I knew that this event is loud and hectic, but I also knew that advertising there is surprisingly efficient. And since I needed to advertise both my September meetup and the conference, I had to attend.

It was the last full day for Boris being here in Chicago, but he agreed that I should go to the meetup, and even volunteered to accompany me, and stoically stayed there for more than two hours of the total havoc. I distributed my flyers and stickers and talked to a large number of people, so I hope to see some new faces in September!

Prioritization

If someone thinks I was relatively quiet in the past couple of days, that was true. The work was fine, but I had a sort of writer’s block with my tutorial, and I started to worry whether I would be able to finish it on time, with all my other responsibilities. One of the things that really bothered me was that I knew that for a workshop of that duration, I needed 100 slides. Also, I knew that even though some of the slides in my presentation were still placeholders, I had already put out there everything I wanted to cover. And when I mentally reviewed my tutorial, I felt strongly that I already had enough material.

I had several industrial slides that required a lot of time for research, but still, there was not enough, and I knew that I shouldn’t expand this part of my tutorial.

Tonight, I was finally able to overcome my writer’s block. I finished all the industrial slides, and when I moved to the next section of my presentation, I realized that there were several placeholders that should have been replaced with three slides each, not one! Finally, I had 94 slides, and I am sure that the remaining ones are somewhere there:).

Finally, I am producing the slides at a normal speed, and I should be able to (mostly) finish everything over the weekend.

And yes, about prioritization! With all being said

  • I covered an early morning escorting shift before work
  • I didn’t go to the Art Institute after work
  • I stopped at Osco for a couple of on-sale items
  • And I went to the beach at seven. The lifeguards were out, the air was cool, and the water was warmer than the air, and I knew that the swimming season was about to end!

And also, our conference website is live! But I will showcase it tomorrow 🙂

Conferences Prep

Lots of people are helping me both for PG DATA and for Prairie Postgres, but I still feel like I am doing “something” related to both non-stop.

We are waiting for our official website to be completed and released to us.

I am building our event in the EventZilla.

I am building the call for papers in Sessionize.

Communicating with the caterer, although another team member did most of the talks.

Approving social media posts and newsletters.

Our regular September meetup is coming.

My talk at Django US.

Recording of my P99 talk.

My September tutorial is still only half-done.

I have houseguests, and I feel like I do not have enough timewith them.

I can keep this list going on forever.

And summer is almost over!

Portland, Oregon

I am about to leave Portland without having seen much, but I’ve had an exceptionally productive workday. Several months ago, J (my peer from Scotland) and I submitted a talk proposal to the FOSSY conference in Portland. The proposal was not accepted, and I moved on with my life.

Then, about three weeks ago, I received a message from J: Could you come to Portland so that we could work on our project? The project meant our talk on the same topic, which was accepted to another conference, which I will be unable to attend. J will be presenting for both of us, but I wanted to participate in the PowerPoint preparation. In addition, our proposal for a community event at PG Conf EU was accepted, and we needed to create an event plan. I didn’t know he was coming, because I knew our talk had not been accepted. He told me that his other talk was, so he was coming. I regret not knowing about it earlier, as I had just recently made plans to visit my friend Lena in Ann Arbor, so I said “no.” But two weeks ago, Lena informed me about her home situation, and we agreed that it would be better for me not to visit now. I immediately thought that in that case, I could go to Portland. I made this trip very minimalistic because I couldn’t waste workdays, and I had things to do at home (and I wouldn’t have any free weekends until October).

If you want to see a crazy person who spends their own time and money to fly for one day to the other side of the country just to work with somebody on a project – that’s me! Fortunately, the conference hotel was very reasonably priced, and I also found that I had $300 credit with American Airlines from last summer when we had to cancel our flight to DC, which was more than half the price of that ticket.

On Friday, I departed from ORD at noon, arrived in Portland at 2:30 PM local time, and still had time to attend the last two sessions at the conference and listen to J’s talk. We agreed on our working sessions’ schedule, and spent most of Saturday working, with interruptions for meals and coffee, and then I left for the airport, where I am now sitting, waiting for my red-eye flight.

Time and money well spent!


At Work And Outside Work

My biggest disappointment of the last weekend was that I didn’t even start multiple projects, which I had planned to both start and finish over the weekend. I believe that my bad planning was the root cause of the problem, as the said plan was completely unrealistic. I was planning how “time-sensitive” events would fit into the schedule without giving a thought to all other activities that had to happen at some point, even if they didn’t have a pre-defined start and end time.

Not only did I leave a lot of conference-related action items incomplete, but I didn’t even start anything related to my conference talks prep, and I have four different talks to prepare, including my huge tutorial, which I barely started. I spent a significant portion of my time panicking about all of the above, along with a clear understanding that summer is short and I have only that many beach days left.

My worktime is extremely intense, and if I manage to carve some time to do something not-work-related, I have to do some work after work. The not-work-related include answering web designers questions two or three times per day, including providing new content, meeting with the whole org committee and individual members about their specific tasks.

I know that in a long run, this will save me time. For example, I talked to a person who volunteered to do our newsletter. I sent her a sample, sent a draft of the next newsletter, asked her to complete, reviewed her work, and met with her on zoom twice. She will be a huge help, but this week, it took over two hours of my time. Same goes to our social media accounts, people who will be handling catering, conference lodging, etc. Their help will be essential, but this week I am panicking because I am late with everything!

On top of that, during the first two days of this week I was asked 1) to vote up one Postgres patch (why me???) 2) to review a book proposal (I refused) 3) to write a new book (“because people like my writing”) – I said to reach out in six months 4) to give my opinion on the work of one of the Postgres “rising stars” company (I agreed and accepted a meeting invite).

… and I worked on my presentations for forty minutes only, when I need many hours!

Prairie PUG

We couldn’t have a meetup in June because an intersection of my availability and our Training Center availability was empty:). That’s a very mathematical description of the situation, but no matter how you describe it, I didn’t have enough energy to look for an alternative, and we didn’t meet.

Yesterday’s meetup was great! I can tell it by how I felt. Finally, I was relaxed and could talk to everyone freely, and didn’t have any worries in the background. A person who was presenting was doing it for the first time; there were some issues, but he handled it well. The audience was very engaged, and the conversation after the meetup lasted until I asked people to leave because I needed to catch the train 😀.

One of the regulars said to me: I do not think I ever told you that, but what you are doing is so inspiring! You do no have to do all the things you are going, but you are doing it for the community! I am not going to lie, I was very happy to hear that!

Prague Postgres User Group And Some Walking Around

Time in Prague was 80% professional, and just a little bit of walking around. The meetup was fun because I had an opportunity to present my Security talk (which is rarely accepted), and Boris gave his temporal aggregates talk, which he would never give otherwise. Meetup pictures:

City pictures:

The neogogthic fountain
The 13th centure church
The motorized butterflies