I just blogged about WhereCampPDX, and am enjoying a few days of quiet before heading out to Google for the Summer of Code Mentor’s summit this coming weekend.

I was so busy I didn’t have much time to blog about the PostgreSQL Conference West. It was great to see everyone, and I came away more sure than ever that PostgreSQL has the best developer and user community. We had so much fun, and I really enjoyed seeing the creative ways people are using PostgreSQL – for business (Proprietary to PostgreSQL), education (Visual Planner) and as a hobby (PL/LOLCODE).

WhereCampPDX was amazing! I had a couple fantastic conversations with Webb Sprague, a regular PostGIS presenter for PDXPUG and Portland PostgreSQL conferences. He’s interested in getting people together to talk about anthropology and tech, and how to better meet the needs of the people who will actually end up using disaster management software in a crisis. Look for a fabulous event from him this spring!

As far as GSOC, I’m hoping to take a lead role in this next year with Josh Berkus‘ help. He’s managed Summer of Code for at least two years, and has worked hard to match mentors and students, and we’ve ended up with several excellent contributions.

My plan for PostgreSQL is to start early on recruitment and project proposals, so that we have an excellent turnout next year. So, if you know of a project you want worked on, or know of students who would be good candidates – let’s get in touch now and start recruiting!

Registration for PDXPUG Day on July 20, 2008 is open! Please sign up and let us know what size t-shirt you’d like. We’re requesting a $20 donation (by cash or check) at the door. All proceeds to to Software in the Public Interest, a 501(c)3 organization that is used to fund PostgreSQL advocacy.

Registration for OSCON is not required to attend.

Registering also gets you in the door at the Gotham Tavern, our after-party location close to the convention center!

Our line-up of talks includes:

PostgreSQL Unit Testing with pgTAP – David Wheeler
Inside the PostgreSQL Shared Buffer Cache – Greg Smith
Muldis D – Portable Databases At Full Power – Darren Duncan
A Streaming Database Talk – Rafael J. Fernández-Moctezuma
Using GLORP to connect Squeak Smalltalk to PostgreSQL – RandalSchwartz
Fighting Disease with PostgreSQL Full Text Search and JRuby on Rails – Mike Herrick
All Your GIS Are Belong to You – Abe Gillespie
What’s PgUS – Joshua Drake

Sign up today!

(Photo from PgDay 2007)

Please submit a talk! The call will be open for 2 weeks and proposals are due June 20th. Follow the link for details on submitting.

http://pugs.postgresql.org/node/400

PDXPUG PgDay will be on July 20, 2008. This is a one-day conference happening the day before OSCON at the Oregon Convention Center.

We are inviting anyone who has something interesting to share about PostgreSQL to send us a proposal!

We’d like to have at least one 1.5 hour tutorial and up to five 45-minute talks.

We welcome talks in any of the following areas:

* Case studies involving interesting and innovative uses of PostgreSQL from an application developer, PostgreSQL developer or administrative user perspective
* Converting from other databases to PostgreSQL
* Howtos for database administration tasks (partitioning, backups, replication, writing stored procedures)
* Practical advice on configuration, monitoring and database management

I gave a Lightning talk today about PostgreSQL User Groups. I wasn’t able to get through ALL my slides – but I only had to rush through the last three. (click on the cat below to download – 5MB)

Lightning talks are some of my favorite sessions. I got to announce the incorporation of PostgreSQL-EU! We had a talk about DBIx::Cache (which you should all check out!), a cool open source lab in Japan that Hiroshi Saito works for (only for Japanese, but very cool), Gavin Roy talked about Staplr and a new benchmarking tool called Playr that was just released on Thursday, and six more talks! We hope to publish the rest of the slides shortly.

I’m in Ottawa at PgCon and listening to Bruce Momjian give the keynote.

We have a few people who’ve joined Twitter in the last couple months and are posting their thoughts through the conference. Try following @crad, @fuzzychef, @franciscojunior and @selenamarie (me) for our up-to-the-minute updates!

I’ll be giving a lightning talk this afternoon around 5:30pm about user groups and PostgreSQL.

Check out the slides from my ptop talk. I was very happy with the end result of the presentation. I had a few people talk to me about the project afterward, including the author of innotop, a perl-based monitoring tool for MySQL. I’m sure we can steal some ideas from that project!

I haven’t gotten much done with ptop since I’ve been back. I’ll have some time after LUG Radio Live!

By popular demand! Magus Hagander is working on a little script so that we can fill in names for everyone. You can also go to the flickr photo and indicate who you are now.

[ I was working on a blog post about the Women In Open Source roundtable I ran, and then Brenda Wallace tweeted: "it seems reasonably easy 2 get women involved in opensource documentation, ui design, and even management. Why is it hard 2 get women coding?" Here's my longer response, mostly with ideas I got from the roundtable. ]

I ran a panel discussion about Women in Open Source at the PostgreSQL Conference East (last weekend). I talked about all the conference events that I’d seen in the last 1-2 years specific to women, and a pair of researchers talked about communication patterns among women on the KDE women’s list. Then we had a 2 hour discussion with the 10 people in attendance.

Three issues that stuck with me from the discussion were:

* Mentoring: Women do not often receive the same type of mentorship that men receive. This has two important consequences: women don’t feel as connected to the community (don’t learn cultural norms, don’t receive favors, don’t get as much praise or reward for work), and women don’t see clear pathways to greater responsibility or prestige (roles are not obvious unless you’re “in the know”, few role models).

* Self-efficacy: Women consistently rate themselves as far less capable than they prove themselves to be. Example: survey of Computer Science undergrads showed that women rated their preparedness at an average of 0%, while men rated their knowledge and prep around 60-70% — even though GRADES proved that the women had just as much ability/knowledge (these 0% folks were getting As and Bs in courses). The UMD researchers said that self-efficacy has been strongly correlated with success in achieving goals.

* Quality of Life: some coding jobs are low prestige, require superhuman hours and aren’t friendly to women (or men) with children. We didn’t have any research to back this up, but there was a lot of speculation that women 25-45 would not be excited to come back to programming after having children because of the life/work balance problems.

Some or all of these issues can probably be linked to the experience of other minority groups.

As far as “what we can do” — I think we need to work environments more humane and accepting of people who have children. There’s a bit of anti-child culture in some high tech circles, and my personal feeling is that this will continue to turn women away.

I also think we need more mentorship! Women need to mentor women, and men need to mentor women. I think training a group of men on how to mentor women would be greatly beneficial — especially if those men-mentors got some kind of seal of approval at the end of their mentorship bootcamp.

There’s always a tension when men mentor women, and maybe if it was a little more organized and some rules were set — like no using the mentorship program as a personal dating service — it might work better than the ad hoc mentorship stuff we have right now.

Less formal than GSOC, but more formal than just contacting people on a mailing list.

Theo Schlossnagle wrote a great blog post about Joshua Drake’s keynote. I wanted to respond to some of his comments here.

I totally agree with Theo that we need to be disruptive! One criticism I have had in the past of the PostgreSQL community is that it has been too centralized, and not willing to experiment with social networking, wikis and other non-hierarchical tools that will get more *end* *users* actively contributing.

I think all of that is changing with the creation of the PostgreSQL-EU and USPgA groups, and the fast uptake in PostgreSQL User Groups in the last few months.

Also, I also respectfully disagree with some comments that were made in other sessions about “us not wanting” the type of users that choose MySQL. *I* want those users to come to my user group meetings. There’s tons we can learn from each other.

We will make PostgreSQL better if we hear and respond directly to criticism from users of the most popular open source database. I’m not saying that Tom Lane and Bruce Momjian need to do that. PUGs should be doing this, filtering out the good/important stuff and communicating information back to -hackers and -core. That’s a great service the user groups can provide to postgresql.org.

Finally, I am so excited about a Baltimore/Washington PUG!! I had several people approach me about a group. I think even the MySQL guy will be interested.

Tomorrow I’ll post my thoughts on the second day of the conference, but for now I’d like to thank a few people who helped tremendously:

• The 6:30am Saturday morning volunteers: Andy, Stephen Frost, Lisa Drake, Melanie Lane, Andrew Dunstan, Jeff Davis, Jay Payne, Andrew Sullivan, Greg Smith (see comment), David Fetter, David’s friend Eric and Magnus Hagander. Those that saw me immediately after 2 hours of sleep – thank you for being charitable
• The videographers: Stephen Frost, Vivek Khera, Jan Wieck
• Greg Smith: for all your work on the schedule, and for writing the table definition for importing CSV-formatted PostgreSQL log files that I referenced in a Linux Magazine article about 8.3
• David Fetter: for putting up with having his “birthday” celebrated three or four times
• Magnus Hagander: for taking an incredible number of pictures. Please have a look at our photo pool on Flickr.
• EnterpriseDB: For sponsoring a fabulous dinner on Saturday night at the Greenbelt Jaspers (Magnus took some great photos).
• Dr. Louiqa Rashid for all her help with organizing the conference and keeping us on track and communicating with the UMD staff
• Pat Ipavich: Thank you for all of your research into campus facilities, and getting us the information we needed to make the conference run smoothly.
• Dr. Katherine Bartol, Yixin Qiu for sharing their research and insights about women in open source with a group of 12 people on Saturday night
• Lisa Drake: for volunteering to staff the reception desk most of Saturday and Sunday.
• The University of Maryland at College Park: the staff were extremely accommodating, helpful and helped make everyone comfortable and happy. Your campus and buildings are beautiful!
• Dan Langille: Thank you for taking the initiative and setting up tables, fixing broken video cables and being our ear in the IRC channel during the morning panel. You did so many other things to help us, and Joshua and I both very much appreciate it. Dan is running his own conference in May – PGCon.
• John Rogelstad for bringing me lunch on Saturday
• Bruce Momjian: Thanks for the fantastic tour of DC last night – including the creative driving There are many, many more things to thank Bruce for — that will need to be another post!
• Andrew Sullivan: for pointing out an important bug in ptop
• The brave MySQL guy Baron Schwartz: who asked the question: What does PostgreSQL have to offer me? I hope we gave a good answer.
• Rob Wultsch: for driving a bunch of tourists around last night and surviving.
• Thank you to all of our sponsors: Afilias, Command Prompt,Continuent, EnterpriseDB, Sun Microsystems, Truviso, xTuple, Open Technology Group, and Emma. I don’t think it overstates things to say that your support of conferences like these ensures the future of open source!
• Finally, thank you Joshua Drake and Commandprompt. We could not have had this conference without all of your time and effort!

If you know of other people that were there, or you were with us at 6:30am and I forgot to thank you, please email me. Especially if I did not get your business card!!

Josh and I were so exhausted at the end! I am so happy with the results — getting to meet with Bruce, Magnus and Jan was incredible. Also, I truly enjoyed chatting with people, hearing about potential PostgreSQL User Groups in Philly, New York, Virginia and the start of a Washington DC-area PUG sponsored by OmniTi – meetings will be on the second Wednesday of the month.

I heard that there is a Russian PostgreSQL Users Group in Moscow — their first meeting drew 30 people, and they are presenting a number of talks at a conference called RIT (Russian Internet Technologies), expected to draw 1000+ people to Moscow.

So many other things that I need to write down soon – but now I have to pack and get on the plane. Stay in touch, everyone!

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