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.
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!
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!
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 fountainThe 13th centure churchThe motorized butterflies
I know, I know – they featured multiple Postgres Women from Europe and the USA, and they were interviewing me for the past two weeks, but it still feels funny!
I genuinely love the graphics, though!
If anybody is interested in the full article, it is here. Enjoy 🙂
ADBIS was the first conference I ever participated in. In this blog, I talked about ADBIS 1996, but there were four total conferences I participated in.
In 1993, I just sat there and listened, pretending I understood something.
In 1994, I had a chance to give a “short presentation,” which was supposed to be something like lightning talks nowadays: one slide, five minutes of talk. However, the session chair was either unaware of how that was supposed to work or didn’t trust me to be able to say something legibly. He just said a couple of sentences about me and my work and waved me back to my seat.
It was 1994, and I was not yet Hettie you all know, so I returned to my seat. The unexpected consequence of this disaster was that almost all of the “nobilities” approached me at the reception and told me how sorry they were that I was not given a chance to say a word. I became exceptionally popular on the spot, to the point that I didn’t have time to eat all the delicious food at the reception. And finally, in 1995, I had a chance to actually present the 20-minute talk, which was accepted by an international CfP committee, and was well-received at the conference.
That’s all to say, that this September, I am going to present a two-hour tutorial at ADBIS 2025! I am excited and a little bit nervous, but more excited :).
The past several days, starting with my return from PGConf.dev, were densely filled with various community activities.
On Sunday, I went to the Chicago Code and Coffee meetup (I planned to do this for a couple of months, but ran into a conflict each time).
It was as loud and loosely organized as it could possibly be with over three hundred nerds in one not-so-large space. The Capital Cafe decided to sponsor the meetup with free drinks, and everyone took advantage of this opportunity. I thought I would not survive in this noise level, but the organizer allowed me to speak immediately after the volunteers, so I was able to advertise my events and myself :). As a result, I have several people joined our new user group, and several RSVPs to Tuesday event.
On Tuesday, I hosted a second meetup of Prairie PUG. Inspired by what I saw at DevOpsDay Chicago, I announced the Developers’ Summit and invited application developers who use Postgres to discuss their pain points and possible solutions. I planned this event for a while, but had to postpone it several times. Finally, i was able to make it a reality.
It went really well (I neglected to take pictures of the group discussions, and only took some during the final presentations, but it was a definite success). The conversations continued after we were done with the “official” part and went back to the cafe for remaining pizza.
Then on Wednesday, I went to yet another meetup! it was the 10th anniversary of AWS meetup. I was planning to start attending this meetup, but for one reason or the other, it never worked. It almost didn’t work this time as well, because there was one more event on the same evening, but I decided I can come for just an hour, and it will be better than nothing!
I came, and talked to the organizers, and also found out that several of the Postgres meetup members attended the AWS meetup as well. I talked with several people, and told them about Prairie Postgres, and distributed my flyers. I saw that two more people joined my meetup next day, so it was not completely useless!
Another event I wanted to attend on the same day was a local CAPS beat meeting. I consider these meetings of police with local residents very important; it was unfortunate that I had so many conflicts this year and could barely attend any of them. This time, I was a little bit late, but was still able to sit through most of the meeting. Out Beat representatives talked about the crime statistics, asked about the incidents we observed on our blocks, explained which apps to use to report crimes, potentially dangerous situations and problems which do not require police involvement. I picked up several flyers for future reference.
I think it was my mistake that I ignored all “other” meetups in the past, and I am glad I started to change it. Overall, I feel like slowly starting to get back to my “normal self.”
During the conference, I had a chance to catch up with some people whom I do not see very often, and I also met several new amazing people. I was really impressed with the students and recent graduates. All of them were so enthusiastic, so eager to learn new things, ready to participate in all discussions, to volunteer! Truly amazing!
These students from Kenya are so sharp! And so fun to hang out with 🙂
I am very happy with this conference. The last time I attended this event was in 2012, and it was before it was rebranded. It was the first Postgres conference I attended, I hardly knew anybody, and didn’t understand most of the talks (and it felt like everyone was smarter than me!) Just to be clear, there were plenty of talks at this conference that I also couldn’t understand, I am just not afraid to say that
I will post more in my professional blog, but also wanted to wave my hand here – I didn’t disappear, all is good!
Hettie's Reflections 