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 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!As always, I went to Robet Haas talk!
Summary: lots of positive emotions and good ideas, but too many people!
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 giftsSponsorsIt was a different photographer than two years ago, and Boris was not even in the front row, but still 🙂 Sponsor passports ready for drawing
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.
I didn’t want to repost my professional blog here, but I wanted to mention that it was a surprisingly positive experience. With all my reservations about online conferences, I really like how Microsoft is doing it! As with everything during the last several months, my participation was rushed, and I felt horrible about it. I thought that my recorded presentation was terrible, but it ended up not being as bad as I thought! OK, I believe they edited it a little bit, but still! I had to be present at Discord during and after my talk for Q&A, and then I realized that there was nothing so much ach
Hettie's Reflections 