At SCale Conference in Pasadena

Conference Prep

We have the conference schedule published. Our Talk Selection Committee did a really fantastic job. I don’t remember when (or whether it was!) the authors’ notifications, final acceptance, and scheduling – everything was on time!

But even with the best CfP committee ever, the conference takes all the time I have, plus more. Just saying 🙂

All Postgres-Related

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.

Fast Forward

On Monday, I was in London, working for the whole day, not leaving the office. Then on Tuesday morning, I flew to Helsinki, and then I found out about the strike and about our flight cancellation and our new flight. Now we are in Brussels, and we have a great time here, but I find it very difficult to detach from work entirely. It was fine for most of the day today, but then we rerutrend to the hotel, and there were some conference-related things, and then something not-really-ork-but-sort-of. So…

That’s our second time in Brussels, and we like it again. Brussels has been good to us 🙂

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:)

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.  

Our Talk at PG Conf EU

“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!

Flying To Prague

The last time I flew business class across the Atlantic was when I worked at Pepsi Americas and had that long business trip to several European countries. Interestingly, it was also American Airlines—lots of very nice food and an option to sleep horizontally for several hours.

O’Hare Terminal 3
O’Hare Terminal 3
BA lounge in Heathrow
The Clarion congress Hotel is integrated with the shopping mall, so I am not sure whether this part is still considered a hotel lobby or not 🙂
The most common business trip story: the only time you see the city if after dusk!