Category: professional

What I Have To Do With India?!

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 2025

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 :).

My Community Work

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.”

Beautiful People

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 🙂

A picture from Women’s Breakfast

pgConf.dev

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!

Pre- conference: Postgres Extensions Day

I didn’t plan to attend, but was convinced by the organizer, and didn’t regret!

First Day In Montreal

The only way to be on time with American Airlines is to take the first morning flight on Sunday! I am saying it for the second time within the past two months! Also, that was the only way to get to the airport from my house in 35 minutes!

Hotel Alt in Montreal:

The conference didn’t even start yet, and I already had so many interesting conversations, and learned about so many additional events which will happen during this week! I regret that I didn’t check all of them out earlier and didn’t sign up for some of the activities. My excuse is that the last couple of months were all bloody fights, and making sure the conference would be a great event, regardless of these fights. I hope that next year will be better, though! At least now I know what to expect and will look for the opportunities.

PG Day Chicago

I’ve stolen photos from every blog post about our conference :), and I hope nobody minds.

It was an amazing event! I am so glad I didn’t give up and was able to deliver a good event for my community!

Continue reading “PG Day Chicago” →

Last Thursday

I hope I will have more time to reflect on the actual days of action, but for now, I just want to say that there were no major issues, things went well, and all my efforts were well paid off.

I had to be at the venue at 7 AM, which meant I had to wake up my houseguests by five, and we had to be out of the house by 6 AM (so that I won’t subject them to running to the train station with my speed :)).

I had fewer people on the training day than signed up, but that’s because I was limited in how much I could advertise, and because it was new. Those who attended loved it and said it was a useful thing before the conference.

Also, it was great that we had to test everything before the main conference day (although some new technical issues came up later). My co-workers helped with stuffing the bags, otherwise we won’t make it 🙂

No pictures from the training itself, since I was running around all the time.

Anns came to help me; she was sick the week before, and ended up having an ear infection and bronchitis, which she found out when she finally went to a Minute Clinic in the evening. I do appreciate her sacrifices, and I can’t even say she shouldn’t have done it, because her help was more than essential.

After the training, I managed to fit in a very short meetup with Jay Miller:

I worked very hard to ensure that this event was held in collaboration with our Black Employees resource group, and that’s part of my commitment to supporting DEI, no matter what the rest of the world does.

And the day was not over yet – we had a speakers and volunteers dinner, which was set up in a great way, and I am very thankful for the catering company for making it just the way I wanted and on a budget!

Our NFP Updates

It is now official: a not-for-profit that I founded with two other brave women is now a recognized Postgres NPO and is proudly present on the postgresql.org website.

That means we will have fewer battles to fight and more time to focus on real work to benefit the community.

There is a conference week ahead, and two million things are still not done, but I see the light 🙂