Tag: conference

Tampere City Hall Reception

Tampere City Hall visit was an absolutely new experience for me, and I wish I took more pictures! The best part was that we could walk arond the whole building, not just a reception hall. Imagine you visit a museum, and you are allowed to sit on all of these beautiful chairs, and come close to these timy wooden tables, and touch the cabinets and vases, and feel it all like a liveable space!

As for the reception itself, the information about it was misleading. The conference program said that we will have this city walk, which will end with the “event” in the city hall. Boris, who should have some visibility into the details said that “there should be food”.

The event started at 7 PM, and all guests were offered champaign flutes upon arriving the the reception hall, and then there were individual plates with four pieces of appetizers (I didn’t realized that I should have taken picture of them, because I thought there will be something else, but that was it :)). The Mayor of Tampere greeted the conference and delivered a short speech about the importance of data technologies, etc; then the trio of musicians was performing something with people keeping talking, and that was it. My point is that they didn’t have to feed us, but the event ended at 8:30 PM, and it was nine by the time we reached the hotel, and it was too late to look for any other food (the hotel kitchen closes at 9 PM, and I didn’t want to go out and wait anywhere for anything ).

I survived, because Boris saved an apple for me, and because we had hot chocolate packs in the room, and I didn’t really need that much, but it was definitely a planning problem 😂.

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Tampere

The ADBIS conference is taking place at the Tampere University, and that’s my first time visiting Tampere. The conference itself is sort of uneventful, and I also had to spend a lot of time still doing some work, because there were always some issues. And it’s cold. Very cold. Way colder than I expected, because the wind makes it feel fifteen degrees lower than it is.

Yesterday, we had a walking tour before the reception, and I think this hour-long walk finally made me sick. I am not exactly sick, but I feel like I am about to get sick, which is even worse. That’s just to explain why I am thinking slowly and not posting about the trip.

Let me try to fix it now.

A mirror in our hotel elevator
The gym – thankfully, 24-hour for real!
The gift to the conference attendees
The swinging chairs in the University foyer
The opening of the conference

On the first day, it was so cold and windy that we decided to stay inside (the hotel is just across the street from the University), and we had dinner at the hotel.

On the second day, there was no choice other than joining this walking tour, which, now I am convinced, made me sick. However, I took some nice pictures 🙂

The city was incorporated in the 1770s (I forgot the exact date), and the old buildings we saw were mostly factory buildings, which are now repurposed for some entertainment venues

Finally, we reached the City Hall, and I will show the reception pictures in a separate post.

DjangoCon US

I think it was the first time in my life that I attended a non-academic, professional, and non-Postgres conference, and it was surprisingly interesting.

I am posting about this conference here rather than on my professional blog, because it’s more about the atmosphere than what exactly the talks were about.

First note: this community did not succumb to whatever the current “official” position is, and fosters diversity for real. Just one nice touch: when you register, they give you your name tag, and then you can add as many ribbons as you like:

I loved the idea of speakers’ ribbons! I will do it for PG DATA
Keanya Phelps made opening remarks. Later, I had a very in-depth conversation with her about how we can work together.
We share the goals and values, and that’s amazing.
The talk about community governance – I talked with the presenters later.

Django’s 20th birthday and DEFNA’s 10th birthday!

Although I am not a “programmer” or an application developer, many talks were really interesting to me because they were about building communities, supporting Open Source, fostering diversity, and working towards the common good.

And we spent a lot of time together with my friend M.

Another thing I loved about this community was how the conference participants organized to experience the best of Chicago, including multiple tours, museums, bike rides, and even an early morning lake plunge. Somehow, when I attend Postgres conferences, most of the attendees are only interested in places to have dinner. It was really refreshing :). I felt being among “my tribe.”

And More Chicago!

While Lena stayed with me over the weekend, I was constantly checking my phone for two reasons: to check what Trump was up to and to follow the moves of my friend from Kenya, who was arriving in Chicago to attend the same conference I was going to attend the next week.

I wanted to be the first person to show her the city, so after Lena left, I immediately headed to the conference venue where my friend was volunteering with the conference setup.

She didn’t even had a chance to check-in to the hotel yet, so we had only two hours, but the Wolf Point Plaza was a great starting point!

And she brought me a dress from Kenya – an amazing dress with gigantic pockets!

We did a lot of things together in Chicago this week – more to follow!

Conferences Prep

Lots of people are helping me both for PG DATA and for Prairie Postgres, but I still feel like I am doing “something” related to both non-stop.

We are waiting for our official website to be completed and released to us.

I am building our event in the EventZilla.

I am building the call for papers in Sessionize.

Communicating with the caterer, although another team member did most of the talks.

Approving social media posts and newsletters.

Our regular September meetup is coming.

My talk at Django US.

Recording of my P99 talk.

My September tutorial is still only half-done.

I have houseguests, and I feel like I do not have enough timewith them.

I can keep this list going on forever.

And summer is almost over!

At Work And Outside Work

My biggest disappointment of the last weekend was that I didn’t even start multiple projects, which I had planned to both start and finish over the weekend. I believe that my bad planning was the root cause of the problem, as the said plan was completely unrealistic. I was planning how “time-sensitive” events would fit into the schedule without giving a thought to all other activities that had to happen at some point, even if they didn’t have a pre-defined start and end time.

Not only did I leave a lot of conference-related action items incomplete, but I didn’t even start anything related to my conference talks prep, and I have four different talks to prepare, including my huge tutorial, which I barely started. I spent a significant portion of my time panicking about all of the above, along with a clear understanding that summer is short and I have only that many beach days left.

My worktime is extremely intense, and if I manage to carve some time to do something not-work-related, I have to do some work after work. The not-work-related include answering web designers questions two or three times per day, including providing new content, meeting with the whole org committee and individual members about their specific tasks.

I know that in a long run, this will save me time. For example, I talked to a person who volunteered to do our newsletter. I sent her a sample, sent a draft of the next newsletter, asked her to complete, reviewed her work, and met with her on zoom twice. She will be a huge help, but this week, it took over two hours of my time. Same goes to our social media accounts, people who will be handling catering, conference lodging, etc. Their help will be essential, but this week I am panicking because I am late with everything!

On top of that, during the first two days of this week I was asked 1) to vote up one Postgres patch (why me???) 2) to review a book proposal (I refused) 3) to write a new book (“because people like my writing”) – I said to reach out in six months 4) to give my opinion on the work of one of the Postgres “rising stars” company (I agreed and accepted a meeting invite).

… and I worked on my presentations for forty minutes only, when I need many hours!

ADBIS 2025

ADBIS was the first conference I ever participated in. In this blog, I talked about ADBIS 1996, but there were four total conferences I participated in.

In 1993, I just sat there and listened, pretending I understood something.

In 1994, I had a chance to give a “short presentation,” which was supposed to be something like lightning talks nowadays: one slide, five minutes of talk. However, the session chair was either unaware of how that was supposed to work or didn’t trust me to be able to say something legibly. He just said a couple of sentences about me and my work and waved me back to my seat.

It was 1994, and I was not yet Hettie you all know, so I returned to my seat. The unexpected consequence of this disaster was that almost all of the “nobilities” approached me at the reception and told me how sorry they were that I was not given a chance to say a word. I became exceptionally popular on the spot, to the point that I didn’t have time to eat all the delicious food at the reception. And finally, in 1995, I had a chance to actually present the 20-minute talk, which was accepted by an international CfP committee, and was well-received at the conference.

That’s all to say, that this September, I am going to present a two-hour tutorial at ADBIS 2025! I am excited and a little bit nervous, but more excited :).

Beautiful People

During the conference, I had a chance to catch up with some people whom I do not see very often, and I also met several new amazing people. I was really impressed with the students and recent graduates. All of them were so enthusiastic, so eager to learn new things, ready to participate in all discussions, to volunteer! Truly amazing!

These students from Kenya are so sharp! And so fun to hang out with 🙂

A picture from Women’s Breakfast

pgConf.dev

I am very happy with this conference. The last time I attended this event was in 2012, and it was before it was rebranded. It was the first Postgres conference I attended, I hardly knew anybody, and didn’t understand most of the talks (and it felt like everyone was smarter than me!) Just to be clear, there were plenty of talks at this conference that I also couldn’t understand, I am just not afraid to say that

I will post more in my professional blog, but also wanted to wave my hand here – I didn’t disappear, all is good!

Pre- conference: Postgres Extensions Day

I didn’t plan to attend, but was convinced by the organizer, and didn’t regret!