Tag: postgres

Our NFP Updates

It is now official: a not-for-profit that I founded with two other brave women is now a recognized Postgres NPO and is proudly present on the postgresql.org website.

That means we will have fewer battles to fight and more time to focus on real work to benefit the community.

There is a conference week ahead, and two million things are still not done, but I see the light 🙂

Welcome Prairie

Please Welcome Prairie Postgres!

PostgreSQL Meetup

Giving some visibility to my non-professional social network 🙂

March Meetup with Ryan Booz

Having Fun At SCaLE!

Prague Dev Day

On Monday evening, I flew to Prague to deliver training at the Prague PostgreSQL Developer Day. I used my full-size (10 hours long) PostgreSQL Query Optimization Training, cut out about 1/3 of it, and updated it with the examples from the book’s second edition. The preparation took way longer than I expected when I submitted this training proposal, but I am happy with the result.

It was a super-short visit to Prague; I barely was outside. I upgraded both my flights to business class because I have nine European upgrades, and I can only use them on Finnair flights. There were only two business class passengers besides me on the way there, and I was the only one on the way back 🙂

Salmon lasagna – I don’t know what Italians would think about it, but I liked it!
I chose the Grand Hotel International due to it’s proximity to the venue, but to be completely honest, it didn’t impress me, although I understand it’s historical significance.
At the entrance of the Department if Information Technologies where the event tool place
And if you are wondering – yes, there were only two female participants out of twenty-five
Together with one of the event organizers, Gulcin Jelinek

And About The Conference

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!
Роберт Хааз — человек, уважающий свою аудиторию, и очень много делающий для поддержки начинающих
As always, I went to Robet Haas talk!

Summary: lots of positive emotions and good ideas, but too many people!

PG Day Lowlands

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 gifts
Sponsors
It was a different photographer than two years ago, and Boris was not even in the front row, but still 🙂
Sponsor passports ready for drawing

PG Day UK

I believe that was the first conference I was late to! Maybe just for 15 minutes, but still – I always arrive early.

My talk went really well, and I am glad I rehearsed it multiple times. It’s not something “revolutionary” in terms of concepts, but I am glad I presented a new and very useful tool for performance analysis.

I think the biggest problem with the conference was a relatively low attendance, which, I think was a combination of being a relatively new event and not enough advertizing. Thereby, the audience was “polarized” – there were many people who “knew everything” and many total novices, and a very little number of people “from the middle.”

Also, the social event after was non-existent: everybody could stop at the pub and use one free drink ticket, but it was so loud and so crowded that the only place you could speak was outside 🙂

At SCale Conference in Pasadena

At SCaLE!

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:)