Category: professional

Employee Spotlight

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 DRW Blog post is here

My Talk At PG Conf EU

Since this talk was not really technical, I thought some of my friends will be interested in watching it:)

Optimization Book Second Edition!

The Optimization Book Second Edition Is Here!

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!