Although my initial desire was to have a short vacation in January, my trip ended up being work-related and Postgres-related. I spent the first day of my trip in our London office, and although the weather was great, I only saw it through the office window:
When I left the office, it was already almost dark, and I just walked to my hotel
I had to wake up at 4 AM the next day, so I couldn’t do much. Of course, it turned out that I needed to login to work, and then I met with one of my Postgres colleagues for dinner.
Hi bought my book right after it became available, and asked me to sign it for him
Then I flew to Helsinki, but because of the strike, we had to leave for Brussels the next day. We had a day for museums, and then on Friday, there was a Postgres Day at FOSDEM, which we both attended. I am not going to talk about technical things here (there is another blog for that), but there was one more book signing:
There was also a dinner for Aiven community advocates, which was in a very cool place, where I should have taken more pictures, but I was too busy talking.
And then, it was FOSDEM itself, a very popular and super-crowded event. I was happy that I met most of the people I wanted to meet, and I think I will try to get there next year as well – there are a lot of opportunities to step out of the world of Postgres into a bigger Open Source world.
My company featured me internally at the Employee Spotlight and externally :). Those who know me can tell that this interview was extensively polished (not only from the grammar perspective) to the extent that I was ready to call it off. However, we finally agreed on the edits :).
The things which fill in all my time for the past couple of days are not work-related but still, very PostgreSQL-related.
The first thing is my talk. I accepted being on an official reserve list for the FOSDEM conference, which means that most likely I won’t deliver my talk; still, I need to be prepared. In order to avoid procrastination, I’ve assigned myself to be a speaker for the January Chicago PUG meetup so that I would have to prepare this talk by January 17. Since next weekend will be one more “girls’ weekend,” I have to complete it in the next couple of days. My initial plan was to be done over the weekend but almost five hours on the phone (with friends and with Boris) made it impossible, and it turned out that there was way more work anyway. So now, I am frantically trying to complete it, and hopefully, I will be done by Wednesday.
The second thing is the conference (PG Day Chicago). There is only one more week left for submissions, and although we have enough submissions, we do not have enough speakers. I spent more than two hours today emailing, composing tweets, and asking people directly on all possible media platforms. I just checked how many new presentations/speakers were submitted, and it looks like I made a material impact :). On the one hand, I am happy with that. On the other hand, it’s wrong that big events in Chicago are still driven almost exclusively by my charisma. In any case, that’s my primary focus until next Monday.  
There was one more talk at the PG Conf EU, which I wanted to mention. I am not posting in my professional blog simply because I already saw at least a dozen posts about it, and I have nothing to add. But since not all of the readers of this blog follow me on professional platforms, I thought it’s worth sharing here.
My friends and peers, two fantastic women whom I genuinely admire, Laetitia Avrot and Karen Jex, delivered a talk, “Trying to be Barbie in Ken’s Mojo Dojo Casa House.” Unfortunately, the conference organizers put this talk in parallel with another very important talk, so the attendance was lower than it should have been, but there was still a big crowd attending, and Laetitia and Karen received a standing ovation. The recording of the presentation is not available yet, but both slides and the talk transcript are available. I am posting both links here, so that anybody interested could download, see and share.
Unfortunately, there were some reactions from some attendees to the effect that “why can’t we have just database talks at the database conference, and why should we instead focus on the gender of a few people?” I believe the response on the social media was perfect: “a few” is exactly why.
Hettie's Reflections 