Category: professional

Speakers And Travel

We had to replace several speakers because they either didn’t get visas or required sponsorship for their travel. While the latter one was no one fault, the visa situation was extremely annoying. People applied for visas way in advance, and they should not have wait for many months. I am still mad that it happened!

Additionally, there were several mini -calamities, like there were three speakers who forgot to register, and there was one speaker who’s flight was delayed multiple times, so he ended up arriving to the venue nine minutes before his talk! Our head of the CfP Committee was pacing the hallway with the phone in her hand watching for the speaker’s messages. I ran up to the registration desk and checked him in, so that he could have his badge ready. He made it!

I should also mention that our keynote was at risk until days before the event, but this was also happily resolved.

And the program was the best I could imagine!

… And Now I Need To Catch Up With Life

Yesterday, I was still meeting with the conference participants, but now I am done, and my French friend who stayed with me during the conference left yesterday afternoon.

Boris and I had 24 hours to ourselves, without any urgent tasks, without answering emails or Telegram messages, without printing additional badges or directional arrows, without replying to sponsors or updating volunteers’ schedules.

We went for a very long bike ride (almost 40 miles) and had a huge breakfast at Lea’s, so I joked that by 9:30 AM, we both burned and consumed all the calories for today :).

There is still a lot of work to close the books for the conference, including all sorts of feedback collection.

I finally feel sleepy. I thought I would sleep for nine hours after the conference, but it’s only today that I feel like going to bed early. Also, I was pushing aside so many “normal” things that I do not know where to start with getting back on track!

PG DATA Conference In Pictures

I know, I know… I know that people do not click the links, especially if this link leads you to several hundred pictures. I know, I know…

Still, I can’t select just a couple of pictures; I can’t even select a dozen or two. I love them all! I just went through the “everything”, which is around 900 photos, and painfully selected just about 300, and that’s the link I am posting here.

I am smiling, going through the photos. Although this time around, I was able to listen to some sessions, it was still a drop in the sea, and it brings me incredible joy to see an engaged audience at each session, everyone listening and asking questions; a great hallway track. Love seeing new faces, love seeing interest and curiosity!

Take a look 🙂

Conference Day 1

Looks like we are rolling! I had tons of positive feedback about the conference; there were many great talks, and it looks like there were no major hiccups (although we will know next week!)

Pre-conference

Several times a day, I think I should write down everything that happens over just a couple of hours: how many conference-related messages I receive, what they are about, and how many responses I need to send out.

It couldn’t be further from “me doing it all alone,” nothing like that! Many people are helping me and handling huge portions of the work, including catering, sending sponsor information, sending messages to attendees, managing social media, and more!

Still… each time I look at the phone or open my laptop to write something personal, I see yet another thing I need to take care of, respond to, or plan.

The conference is just a week away, and I can’t believe it. And there are so many things to do – still!

Pictures From The Conference

This year, I felt way more “in the right place” than in Montreal last year. I do not know whether to blame the conference or myself :). Below are the pictures from the conference social media or taken by other people.

“DBA confessions”
What is Postgres Compatible? with Jimmy Angelakos. Since this discussion was based on the results of a half-day event we ran in Riga, Jummy called it “Riga Consensus,” and I liked it!
After “Women’s Breasfast”
I am posing by the poster of my college together with his co-author.
With Monica

First Meetup At Chicago Innovations: I Loved It!!!

Prairie Postgres May meetup: the Mythical data Warehouse

About Career Change

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a virtual event called “Women & Visibility.” I believe the name is self-explanatory. A panel of successful female professionals shared their stories about the hurdles they had to overcome to be heard, not ignored, and recognized for their contributions.

Unfortunately, nothing new! We heard these stories many, many times! One of the side discussions, however, caught my attention. The panel host asked the participants whether each of them had a significant shift in their professional career, perhaps even a career switch, that launched their future success. And all the panelists agreed.

I started thinking about what was wrong with me :), because I am one of these incredibly dull people who do the same thing all the time. I have been doing databases and almost nothing except databases for more than 40 years, and that’s the field where I transitioned from “nobody” to “somebody.” And then I thought that, in some sense, I had a career switch, and more than once. For many years, I never thought about myself as “standing out.” I knew I was good at what I was doing; good enough to always have a job, even being a single mom with three small children. Still, I was in a realm of “I need a secure job with a stable paycheck.” Only much later, I transitioned to the mindset of “I want to take responsibility for my actions, I want to make my decisions, and be responsible for the consequences.” And much later, it became: “I want to help others, I want to build a community, I want to take part in making the world a better place.”

Maybe this still counts as a career change, even though I’ve been working with databases all my life?

Other Things I’ve Been Busy With Recently

Illinois Prairie PostgreSQL Meetup is moving!

Bureaucracy

That’s the mildest term for how things went with registering our NFP with the Office of the Illinois Attorney General. When I started this journey in October 2024, everyone who was ever close to the NFP business would tell me that getting the tax-exempt status with the IRS was the most difficult and time-consuming task.

Indeed, registering an NFP took two days and was all online; setting up our EIN took only days and was all online as well. The trademark business took a couple of weeks, but only because we ran into some inconsistencies on the trademark holder’s website, and it took time to resolve it. Our greatest surprise, the tax-exempt letter arrived only fice weeks after we applied! Nobody could believe it, and I counted our blessings.

The last step was registering with the Illinois AG office, and that was the first thing we had to do on paper. We checked the list of documents we had to submit, both Anna and I signed them, I printed them and sent the package by Priority Mail.

A week later, I saw our registration fee check cashed, and I thought that we will recieve the confirmation letter soon. However, when the letter arrived, it was not the confirmation of the registration, but the list of things we did wrong!

We submitted the corrected package, and after that, somehting weird started to happen. People were not returning our calls, the documents we mailed were never received even though the tracking showed it ws delivered. It took many hours to reach anyone, and at some point, we were told that we abandoned the registration, because we never mailed missing information, and we had to start all over.

At that point of our odyssey, I started walking to the AG office and leaving the papers there, making sure they are all stampted as received. This didn’t stop the stream of the lost items. Also, by that time, the AG office finally introduced the online application submission system, but since we started on paper, we had to continue on paper, and it took even longer. Finally, when we received a new list of missing items, Anna and I got together online and wrote an email to our State Representative Constituent service, who saved us!

It still took several weeks! However, each time “something was missing” we took a note regarding how long it would take if our State Rep office won’t interfere. I believe, they saved us anothe six months!

My biggest regret is that I didn’t know we didn’t have to wait for this registration to apply for the Illinois Tax Exempt status! We could already have it, and now it’s another six months wait! At least, I could apply online!

And the moral of the story – Long live Constituent Service!