Category: professional

Other Things That Keep Me Busy

Work is nonstop, but I also have almost as much (if not more) going on with my Postgres Community activities (and what’s not). The things that are falling apart are so many that I do not want to talk about them. If I didn’t receive some positive signals from the Universe, I would assume that the Universe is telling me to give up on half of the things I am doing.

On the talk preparation side, I had to prepare three different versions of my security talk: a forty-minute talk for PG Day Chicago, a twenty-minute talk for Lighting Talks at the office, and a five-minute talk for DevOpsDay Chicago.

The last one was the most difficult and took more time than the other two combined. The problem was not even five minutes, but other requirements. Usually, I plan one slide per minute, and I know that this averages correctly. However, at this event, they requested twenty slides for a five-minute talk, and they will automatically advance a slide every 15 seconds!

I never had to do anything like that! At first, it seemed like an impossible task. Also, I was not allowed to use animation; it had to be twenty slides, not twenty clicks. I had to learn how to set up a slide show and rehearsed multiple times, each time making changes to the slides. It sounds unbelievable how much I worried about this five minutes! However, that’s the first time I was invited to talk at the DevOpsDay, and my goal is to spark interest and to make sure people approach me and talk with me after the presentation. That means the presentation has to be flawless.

I finished it last night and submitted the slides to the conference, and only then I realized how much it bothered me! I am leaving to Pasadena tomorrow, and it feels like a 40-minute talk on a different topic in front of a very large audience is less stressful 🙂

Yesterday

There was a snowstorm, and I had a meetup after work with sixty RSVPs. I reminded people to change their RSVP if they decide not to come, but only five people canceled. After some hesitation, I ordered pizza (not for all sixty, but for forty :)), and then I was wondering whether anybody would show up.

In the end, at least twenty people, if not more, showed up, and we had a great presentation and a great discussion, but one thing really touched me.

I know a person who has delivered our pizza for many years – he delivered it to six different addresses :). We are practically friends. Yesterday, when he rolled the cart in, he told me: I brought something just for you! Here is some warm soup and some cookies! Perfect for the weather!

It was the sweetest thing, and I thanked him many times and started to eat the soup right away!

And that’s how our meetup went!


Conferences

It’s a perfect storm of upcoming events.

  • One of my talks was accepted for the SCaLE conference (first week of March in Pasadena). This one is the easiest – I can reuse my September talk, I just need to refresh my memory regarding the examples, and as usual, I need to advertise it on social media
  • I was invited to give a short talk at the Chicago DevOps Day on March 27. They chose my security talk, but I need to create a “Lighting version” of it, which will be extremely challenging
  • I am (maybe) invited to a financial conference in Chicago on March 27, I will talk with them on Monday and hopefully figure out whether I am doing it or not.
  • I am invited to do a podcast on Data Bene. I am talking with them on Tuesday, and we will decide on a date.
  • My security talk was accepted for PG Day Chicago. The last time I gave it was a year ago, and many things have changed since then, so I need to prepare a new version of it
  • On top of that, I need to address all aspects of the conference itself (a list too long to put here) and even a longer list for DevDay, which will precede it.
  • None of my talks for PgCon.dev were accepted, but the Community Summit proposal to which I was last-minute invited was, and now we have a lot of work ahead!

  • And this has been all along with work and other aspects of life!

Prague Dev Day

On Monday evening, I flew to Prague to deliver training at the Prague PostgreSQL Developer Day. I used my full-size (10 hours long) PostgreSQL Query Optimization Training, cut out about 1/3 of it, and updated it with the examples from the book’s second edition. The preparation took way longer than I expected when I submitted this training proposal, but I am happy with the result.

It was a super-short visit to Prague; I barely was outside. I upgraded both my flights to business class because I have nine European upgrades, and I can only use them on Finnair flights. There were only two business class passengers besides me on the way there, and I was the only one on the way back 🙂

Salmon lasagna – I don’t know what Italians would think about it, but I liked it!
I chose the Grand Hotel International due to it’s proximity to the venue, but to be completely honest, it didn’t impress me, although I understand it’s historical significance.
At the entrance of the Department if Information Technologies where the event tool place
And if you are wondering – yes, there were only two female participants out of twenty-five
Together with one of the event organizers, Gulcin Jelinek

My professional New Year Resolution

In 2025, I want…

How The New Year Started

Obviously, it’s a new year – a new crisis at work, but in addition, I realized about a week ago that I need to rework the training I am doing in Prague at the end of January. When I submitted this training proposal, I knew “I had it,” but what I didn’t realize was that :

  • It has been two years since the last time I ran this training, and all examples are from the book’s first edition and from the year 2020
  • I need to apply different template/different formatting
  • I have almost three times more material than the training time, so I needed to decide what to keep!

And… that all takes time! And it’s about 220 slides!

And About The Conference

And of course, there was a conference! And I am blogging about it a week later! PGConf.EU 2024 took place in Athens, and that was my primary reason for traveling. It’s the world’s largest Postgres conference, but this year, it was the largest ever Postgres conference – almost 800 participants!

This time, I didn’t have any accepted talks, but as I told everybody who was wondering – nothing can prevent me from talking! And I talked a lot! Of course, I was also listening to the presentations – there was only one session in three days when I didn’t attend any talks (Boris and I went to see the archeological site of the Temple of Zuess during this time), and it was only because of the last-minute speaker substitution.

I met with a lot of people: my old friends and colleagues, people who heard about me or read my blogs and were happy to meet me IRL, and people whom I helped in different ways. Unfortunately, there were also many stressful moments. I tried to meet with a couple of people to solve some long-running issues, and that didn’t happen, and I keep chasing them from the first day of the conference till the last day.

No pictures of me, but plenty of pictures of my good friends:

9I made sure to attend almost all talks of female speakers!

Something everyone should know!
Роберт Хааз — человек, уважающий свою аудиторию, и очень много делающий для поддержки начинающих
As always, I went to Robet Haas talk!

Summary: lots of positive emotions and good ideas, but too many people!

Petition: One Month Later

Alicja’s Petition: One Month Later

PG Day Lowlands

Friday, September 13 – the Pg Day Lowlands team was brave enough to have their first event scheduled on that day :). And it went really well! I liked a lot of things about it, and I definitely want to use some of them for PG Day Chicago, including the rule that Boriss Mejias mentioned about always leaving a space for a fith person to join a group of four. I also loved the idae of Sponsor Passports, which encoraged the participants to visit all sponsor tables.

I started this post three days ago, but never had time to finish because the moment I returned to work, I had no time for anything else. But now, I have pictures taken by a professional photographer, so instead of posting whatever pictures I took, I can post really high-quality ones. So now, there just a couple of mine left :).

Here are some of them (of cause, I am shamelessly posting the pictures of myself:))

Speakers gifts
Sponsors
It was a different photographer than two years ago, and Boris was not even in the front row, but still 🙂
Sponsor passports ready for drawing

June Chicago PUG

That was the most challenging meetup I ever had, in a positive way, you may say, but still challenging. It was a joined meeup with Chicago Open Source Data Infrastructure Group. I came to their meetup several months ago and talked to their organizer, and we agreed to stay in touch. Later, he contacted me asking whether it would be possible to use our training center for their meetup. I said: unfortunately, not, and then he asked me whether I would be open to a joined meetup. we agreed on June 11 and announced it in our respective User Groups.

At first, the rate of RSVP was as usual: a couple of regulars responded right away, and then more and more responses were coming here and there. Usually, there is a spike of RSVPs in the last couple of days before the event. I was even a little bit worried that the response rate was slow in the beginning since Matty didn’t post the talk topic from “their” side. But then, all of a sudden, I saw more and more RSVPs, and when the total number on both meetups got to sixty-five, I started to panic. Usually, I have 40-45 RSVPs, and I expect 25-30 people to show up, and I have all the formulas how to calculate the right number of pizzas, and they won’t work for a bigger numbers.

By the end of the day on Monday, the total number of RSVPs (not counting those were people forgot to put their full names) was eighty-six! I was unsure whether the printing machine at the security desk was working (it didn’t work the last two times), so I decided to print the list and to ask security to prepare the bdges in advance.

It turned out that great minds think alike, and they already came up with that same idea (and the printer was working!). I ordered $800 worth of pizza and almost killed myself bringing the drinks from CVS all by myself (I was a complete idiot about that, there were people whom I could ask, and I didn’t!)

Fifty two people showed up! It was amazing! And everything worked fine with Zoom. We had great networking both before and after the talks, and several people approached me and asked whether they could help with future meetups. However, there is one thing I started to worry about. I was not presenting, I just said a couple f words in the beginning. Still, there was a line of people who wanted to talk to me after the meetup. You can usually see this line after a very successful conference presentation. A dozen people wanted to talk to me to know my opinion about some aspects of Postgres and their career and life in general :).

I find this concerning because the meetup should be about Postgres, not about me. If I won’t be there, things won’t happen, and that’s something I need to work on.