Tag: postgres

Acting Like A Leader

I am listening to “Atomic Habits,” a well-knowing book, mostly building on the “Power of Habit,” which I read a long time ago and really liked. 

As it often happens, you notice the closest ideas to what you are thinking about at the moment. This time, it was the well-known idea of “if you want to become something, act as if you already are.” To be precise, in the book, the author rephrases it like “do not say: I want to run a marathon, say: I want to become a runner.”

The reason I paid attention to this statement is the conversation I had on Friday. Among other things, I was asked about “things that work” with the Chicago PUG. While answering that question, I started to list all the things I usually mention when people ask me, “How did I build it.” I talked about having specific dates, announcing meetups early, starting on time, engaging the audience, coaching the first-time zoom speakers. And I ended my answer with one simple statement: I am a community leader, people are looking up at me, and I felt the responsibility to act.

And that is the most important reason that Chicago PUG is running regular meetups, one of the very few PostgreSQL meetups regularly running during the pandemic. 

I vividly remember how I felt a year ago. I had to make difficult choices, and at that time, I was very unsure of what is the right thing to do, and I was questioning myself and my actions, and the situation was changing not by days but by hours. 

First, I announced the change of speaker. Then, I announced the rescheduling. And two weeks later, I announced going virtual. I opted to be a first zoom speaker because I knew it could be a very miserable experience (and it was). But the important thing was that we were able to continue our activities and the PUG members responded with great attendance. 

I am very proud of all of us, and I hope that later this year, we will be able to switch to the hybrid meetups:)

Eternal Happiness

Remember how I said last week, that I made several important decisions, and I feel the happiest person because of that.

Well, today I finally started to execute on one of these decisions, and I feel over the moon. Just to be clear – it is professional :). But people who know me long enough also know that my worst moment and my happiest moments are most often related to something I am doing in the professions sphere.

The extent of my happiness clearly shows that at least this decision was the right one 🙂

The Book Is About to Go Into Print

Yesterday, I approved a cover proof of our book:). Our editor told us that it will go in production on March 8 and will be available on May 7, which is very exciting.

Also, our technical reviewer published a blog post about the NORM methodology, and it raises a lot of interest (as I can tell by the number of people hitting my GItHub repo. I know that my friends in tech follow me on LInkedIn, but still I will post the link here as well:

https://www.enterprisedb.com/blog/how-no-object-relational-mapping-norm-improves-application-performance-postgresql

The Book Is Official!

I will write more on one of the subsequent days, but I really want to share my news, which one of my former co-workers called “the next most important news of the day after inauguration.”

Last week, our book became official, we are on Amazon, and we will be published at the end of April.

Here is it: Amazon.

I made an official announcement a today’s meetup of Chicago PostgreSQL User Group. Also, we officially announced the open source database postgres_air, which we developed to illustrate the concepts from the book. But it ended up to be more than that, and we decided to give it to the community as our contribution.

I am happy in all possible ways 🙂

Here is the recording, if somebody wants to hear a lot of me :). Tomorrow, there will be LinkedIn blog posts, and I will upload the video there as well, but not everybody follows me on LinkedIn 🙂

My Talk at the PostgresBuild Conference

Session Recording – I Do Not Think I Will Ever Do It Again!

If I could only imagine that the preparation for my talk at the PostgresBuild conference would take almost two days, I would never submit my talk proposal! A fun fact is that I invested a lot of time to submit a proposal for my bitemporal short tutorial, which was such a success at October Chicago PUG, and it was my last-minute decision to add one more proposal – for the NORM talk.

Then, just this last-minute-not-so-much-thought proposal got accepted. Only after it was accepted, I learned that it has to be only 30 minutes, and only after that, I learned that should be recorded! 

Do not take me wrong; I understand the organizers. With the tight schedule as it is, nobody wants technical difficulties at the moment of presentation. But imagine what does it take to record a tutorial! 

I had to record screen videos for several slides; I had to adjust their timing several times to make sure the whole presentation fits in 30 minutes. Then I had to come up with the background because they had very specific requirements. It turned out that my Mac Air is not powerful enough to have a custom background for zoom., so I had to move to the work laptop. Then – black sweater and makeup.

During my first full recording, I when six minutes over. When I started to record one more time, ten minutes into the recording, I realized that Boris left one extra field in the picture. (I asked him to re-draw the picture we used for the NORM talk in Cyprus to go with my new training example. Previously, he already re-drawn it for the book, and then one extra field from the airlines example was left. Good thing I had to re-recode! If not these six minutes extra, I won’t re-record, and it will still have an error in the presentation! 

Then I started recording from the updated slide, and then six minutes before the presentation’s end, Boris’s phone rang – with a spam call! 

We spend another hour and a half figuring out how to combine several pieces on QuickTime – this app has its ways of thinking what’s right!

There is one visible gap in the final presentation, but I decided I can’t do it any longer! 

We Did It!

On Sunday, we finally submitted Chapter 5, and I feel so good about it, I can’t even describe it! In the past ten days, I was so focused on that chapter that I could hardly think about something else.
I mean, I did many other things; I saw two movies, and I was at the Art Institute, and I went to the shelter, and yes, I worked. You can say that I did a variety of things, but to be honest, I felt guilty doing “anything else.”

I could not understand why this chapter takes so much time and effort until Saturday when I looked at the page count and realized that this chapter was almost as long as the previous four! No wonder!
I felt better right away :).

I have to admit that I didn’t challenge our delivery schedule because we do not have that much wiggling room until the end of the year anyway. I thought that a day here and a day there does not make a difference. And I hardly looked at the estimated chapters sizes.

The most time-consuming part was that I had to rework all of the examples, and several times through this process, I would find problems with our generated data. Then, I had to stop building examples and ask Boris to generate new data, and then I had to reload several tables and start over. And Anna had to do all her edits after we are done, and we were not done until the last moment. I am so thankful to Boris and Anna for their heroic efforts in the past several days!

We did it! And we did it well!

And we have eleven more chapters to go :).

A Moment of Real Happiness

Tonight, I presented my NORM talk at a PG Conf webinar. That was the second time I gave it after the SOFSEM conference in January. Two weeks ago, I used it to reopen Chicago PUG online, and I felt that the presentation went horrible. Other people were saying I did great, but I didn’t feel that way. It was challenging to present without hearing and seeing the immediate reaction of the audience. Besides, I faced some technical difficulties.

That time, I practiced in zoom the day before to make sure I almost know it by heart, including all the jokes, and it went really well. Even though I haven’t heard the audience, I could feel that people are engaged. The questions in the zoom chat started to appear while I was talking, and there were lots of them!

Also, I am so glad I put together a GitHub repo with a working example! I hope that this will open a new chapter in the life of the NORM framework.

I felt great after my presentation was over. It was probably as close to the atmosphere of the real conference as it could get:)