Category: professional

It’s Not Work But

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.  

“Trying to be Barbie…” Talk

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.

The slides.

Transcript

Some pictures:

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.

Our Talk at PG Conf EU

Our PG Conf Talk: So, You Want To Have a PG Day In Your City?

A Final Push

Earlier in December, Springer informed us that we would receive the second edition proof on December 26, and we would have until December 31 to submit corrections. I sighed, but – well, what can we do? I am not going to take time off anyway!

Then, early in the morning on December 20, we received another email: Good news! Your proof is ready earlier! Please review and submit your corrections by December 26.

… and that’s all about how I spent my Christmas day!

🤷🏻‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️

“Postgres at Scale” Community Panel

“Postgres at Scale” Community Panel

The Conference Is In Progress, And I Don’t Have Time For Anything Else!

At the Speaker’s Dinner- there are way more women in Postgres these days!

Wish Granted When I Lost Hope!

For years, I’ve been trying to attract college students to my meetups, and I tried all different strategies, involved external help, and organized meetings with some college officials – all in vain! On the eve of my last meetup, I saw several new names in the RSVP list, and I almost started to wonder whether it was some scam :).

And then, four of them actually showed up, and they were actual live students, and they listened and asked great questions and talked to my speaker afterward.

I asked them how they found this meetup, and they told me they were just “looking for technical events” and saw it popped up!

The moral of the story, I am afraid: “It’s not me, it’s them,” meaning that it’s not I do not advertise enough, but it’s there is not enough understanding of the importance of attending events of that kind!

May Chicago PUG

I just published a post about our May meetup in my professional blog, and I wanted to add a couple more things to that.

Almost as always, I worried that people won’t come, that it’s too close to the conference, and that just having many of the world -class speakers, nobody would be interested in “made in Chicago.”

I was happy that my worries didn’t materialize, and I was happy to see new faces. Also, remembering my reflections on how to make this event more welcoming to the newcomers, I made sure to stop by and talk to the new members. I saw a female student, and I stopped by her after the talks were over to welcome her and encourage her to ask questions, and complimented her for being brave to come to the room full of unfamiliar faces.

I think she was very empowered by this conversation because she kept asking me about Postgres, my career, and lots of other things. I hope she will come again!

PG Day Chicago

I did it, and I did it! And it took me several days to realize that everything went well (mostly :)) and there is nothing to worry about and to lose sleep at night anymore!

My personal fitness stats: 19,000 steps on the day of the conference (that’s I never left the building between 7 AM and 8 PM!), and minus three pounds in three days (I absolutely did not need it). I do not know how I managed not to get sick the week of the conference – the weather was more than unpredictable, I didn’t sleep enough and worried about all sorts of things, and I almost lost my voice at the speaker’s dinner, but somehow managed to stay alive and well :)).

I have a long list of takeaways: buy lanyards myself, do not rely on people who order it the last minute (it didn’t arrive on time), do not turn away any volunteers (two people, including Anna, got sick and could not come), do not assign room monitoring to new volunteers (there was one disaster). Make sure there is water in all rooms, and test all the microphones. Possibly have the pre-conference dinner at the venue instead of a pub (I know that some would disagree). Advertise earlier and more aggressively. To be fair, I had two conferences in March, so I physically could not put enough effort into advertising. I am happy that we made it to 108 registrations, but it took me more effort than it should have.

Most importantly, people liked it. I had a lot of positive reviews. And it looks like now, I have it. I mean, this conference. So I will be busy every April 🙂

I Did It!

I can’t believe the conference is over, and it was a success! I can’t believe I did it. We did it! All this week, I worked so hard that I had no time for anything else!

We are done, and everything was great! Well, there are definitely things that could be done better and a lot of things I would do differently next time, but none was a disaster:)

I am happy 🙂