I’m working on my keynote for FrOSCon right now.
They asked for me to revisit the “Mistakes were Made” talk. My introduction will probably be a lot the same. A core idea is a theory that the ratio of failure to success remains mostly constant over time. So, in order to succeed a lot, we need to be trying and failing a lot more.
But this talk, I am planning to go into what concerns me the most about open source software: succession.
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Many thanks to all the community members who have submitted fantastic proposals to Postgres Open so far.
We’ve decided to extend the submission deadline by 1 week, closing July 3, 2012 at 11:59 pm.
Have a look at our CFP and submit a talk!
Hope to see you in Chicago this fall.
Postgres Open welcomes your talks and workshops for our conference. Presentations should be oriented towards the business or development user of PostgreSQL, and should have substantial technical content. Submissions are due by 11:59pm, June 26, 2012.
Last year’s conference had about 175 attendees from all over the world, and included speakers from EnterpriseDB, Heroku, 2nd Quadrant, Hewlett Packard and PG Experts — our first sponsors for 2012. We also had speakers from startups like Urban Airship, and financial services companies that use Postgres at the core of their analytics.
Submit a proposal today!
Currently we are looking for seven kinds of talks:
Briefs (20min): short technical topics, product introductions, and mini-case studies.
Scaling (50min): experiences, tools and technical details of how you scaled PostgreSQL to meet unusual challenges. Talks about scaling typically cover PostgreSQL in high throughput or high concurrency environments, big-data, data-warehousing, sharding and replication for scaling purposes.
Products (50min): technical presentations on your PostgreSQL-related product or project, either open source or proprietary. These should cover both the “how” and the “why” of usage.
HOWTOs (50min): Brief DBA or developer-oriented presentations of how to solve a problem, accomplish a task, or achieve a goal with PostgreSQL and related tools. This includes performance tuning, application development, database architecture, and features.
Innovations (50min): Presentations on new PostgreSQL features and related projects or ones in development. Cutting-edge code, tools and techniques with users can make use of today are welcome.
Case Studies (50min): Detailed stories on how a company or organization accomplished extraordinary things with PostgreSQL, or how they migrated from another DBMS. Preferably, Case Studies should be presented or co-presented by a member of the organization involved.
Workshops (3 hours): hands-on tutorials which thoroughly ground attendees in a particular technology, technique, product or tool. Workshops should include demonstrations, audience interaction, and optionally, guided hands-on exercises. If attendees need to arrive with specific software installed, please note it in the talk description.
Postgres Open is dedicated to providing high-quality content to attendees. As such, we request that all presenters be executives, team leaders, engineers or architects (not sales or marketing line staff). Presentations should have substantial technical or educational content. If you have questions about whether or not a particular presentation topic is appropriate, please contact program2012@postgresopen.org.
Submit a proposal today! Submissions are due by 11:59pm, June 26, 2012.
I was on the radio program Think Out Loud here in Portland this morning. Before getting on the radio, I prepared a few things to say and wanted to share a longer form of what I was thinking.
I’ve been blogging more about women’s issues in relation to open source community and technology more generally. The experience is finally something that’s pretty fun — because there is finally research, success stories and a real sense of optimism among my friends and colleagues.
This is in no small part because of the wonderful experiences I’ve had working in open source and on PostgreSQL.
Today’s big story is that Facebook just acquired Instagram for $1 billion.
Instagram is a hugely popular image sharing app – until recently only for iPhone. Last week they released an Android version, which caused many of my friends to finally start using it. 
But you know what’s an even bigger story? Instagram runs Postgres. And, their engineering team has been posting juicy tidbits about PGFouine and pgbouncer over the last year.
I love that companies are succeeding with Postgres in a huge way.
We’re seeing Postgres become the default technology choice for new tech companies. As those companies grow or are acquired, we’ll see Postgres becoming an important part of many more organizations.
It’s no coincidence that Bruce posted this morning about “The New Postgres Era“. The quality of the Postgres community’s software products is recognized, and the developers who use our software are succeeding.
Happy Friday!
PostgreSQL was accepted into the 2012 Google Summer of Code program! 180 organizations were accepted, and as they fill out their contact information, they are becoming visible on the GSoC website.
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A friend told me about their sharding scheme last night, and it made me very curious about how others are handling this problem. This question about database design turns into a devops issue, so it’s something really the entire development group and devops and DBAs need to be aware of and concerned about. And it’s not a problem exclusive to Postgres.
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Happy Friday!
Postgres Open‘s website is back up! Next week, we’ll be announcing sponsorship opportunities for 2012 and opening our Call for Speakers shortly after.
Some IT guys discovered Postgres and made a series of videos about what they’re learning. They came from Windows backgrounds, so their observations were a great introduction to what it’s like for non-Linux-y people when they first try Postgres out.
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Today, PostgreSQL Global Development Group released new versions of all active branches. This includes three security bugfixes, two of which are pretty obscure and one that fixes a possible security issue with restoring un-sanitized output from pg_dump. Details about the security issues are included in the release announcement.
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I’ve been sick for a few days, so I settled in with a nice cup of tea and started in on the tremendous backlog I’ve got on pgsql-hackers. I put patch status at the end of each paragraph.
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