What I’m going to see at PostgreSQL Conference West

lifeline
“I’d like to use my lifeline to figure out what to go to at PostgreSQL Conference West…”*

PostgreSQL Conference West is coming up this October 10-12, and the schedule was just published. Unfortunately, it’s a little tricky to navigate the list of talks on the site, so I decided to post my itinerary to help you if you’re looking for a guide!

So, I cheated a little and included some things that I won’t be able to see – but there’s really a lot of good stuff.

I’m so happy to see so many Portland locals presenting at this conference! All the Portlanders called out below are members of PDXPUG. Our next meeting is on October 16, 2008, 7pm at FreeGeek.

It shows how strong our community is that we were able to support two PostgreSQL-specific conferences (the earlier was PDXPUG day before OSCON) IN PORTLAND this year!!! Yay for us.

Here’s what I’ll be attending:

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Leaving US PostgreSQL Assoc. – what’s next for me?

A smiling pug
image credit to bugbunnybambam

A few weeks ago, I decided to resign from the United States PostgreSQL Association board. Shortly after, I left for a long vacation where I thought about what I wanted to do next – both professionally and in a volunteer capacity.

Looking back, I started volunteering for PostgreSQL two years ago. I’ve led PDXPUG, staffed many conference booths, given nearly a dozen talks and run conferences. Of the work I’ve done, I’ve been most surprised by the creation of the PUGS website and all the user groups that followed.

This may sound silly – but I was so incredibly proud to see user groups in Oklahoma, Toronto, Los Angeles and the D.C.-area (BWPUG) hold meetings, share their experiences and publish fantastic presentation slideshows. All while I was out of the country!

That’s a true sign of success to me: groups of people leading themselves and sharing their knowledge with each other. It’s open community, with minimal bureaucracy, and (I hope) maximum fun.

With that in mind, I’ve decided to make this next year’s volunteer work focused on a simple idea:

Enable people to connect and learn directly from each other.

So what you can expect from me over the next year is more of the same, but now with that end goal in mind: more PostgreSQL user groups (for as long as the postgresql.org folks would like me to stay), more ways to connect people directly to each other, more authentic community building through un-conferences, and more contributions – through code, testing and presenting of that work.

To give you an idea — here’s what I’m up to over the next couple of months:

  • Linux Plumber’s Conference, September 17-19 – with Gabrielle Roth, we’ll be presenting information about databases (PostgreSQL specifically) and filesystem performance using data gathered from the recently installed PostgreSQL performance lab.
  • PostgreSQL Conference West, October 10-12 – I’m not organizing this year, but I’m organizing a session on hacking PostgreSQL, led by some PostgreSQL hackers!
  • WhereCampPDX, October 17-19 – I’m helping organize this un-conference for geography-specific tech – practicioners, professionals, enthusiasts, artists! We’ve got some great ideas and hope to publish details in the next week about the awesome folks involved, the venue and the parties!

Hope to see you at these events!

I haven’t talked about my work much in this blog, and probably will continue not to do that much here – but I also wanted to share that I’ve taken a position with End Point Corporation, a fantastic company that works on open source software, and provides support for PostgreSQL. I’ll be focusing on PostgreSQL, and doing a little Perl development here and there.

Pluggable architecture, not just for code

hands

photo from Chris Zakorchemny

One OSCON session that made me think was “Does Open Source need to be organic?” The panel contained Brian Aker (MySQL), Rob Lanphier (Linden Lab), Stephen O’Grady (Redmonk), Theodore Ts’o (Linux Foundation). The session was less about business vs. community, and more about how to increase community involvement in your projects.

Brian Aker mentioned Launchpad, and the way that it handles code forks. Forks are integrated into the system using a new revision control system – Bazaar. The forks are front and center – allowing all developers on the project to add forks and update them, incorporating them in with the primary code distribution point. This model reinforces the idea that forks are natural and can be positive evolutions in open source projects.

My big take-away: If you want to increase community contribution to open source projects, provide public and easy-to use interfaces. Publish your API early and create pluggable interfaces! Let developers add functionality and publish their add-ons easily, both in your project’s development space and on their own.

The same principal can be applied to the people side of open source projects. In your organization, make roles, tasks and responsibilities transparent. Let everyone – inside AND outside the project – know what they could be doing to get things done. The mistake that many projects make is assuming that people know what they could be doing.

Think of the people-side of projects the same way as you think about the code. Documented APIs are the same as public mailing lists, blog entries and wikis that reveal what your organization is actually doing, and how new people can get involved. Roles and titles that are meaningful let people know who they should bring their ideas to. And that lowers barriers to participation.

Leadership is not just telling people what to do – it’s inspiring, facilitating and then getting out of the way of people who are willing and capable of doing things on their own. Community grown from inspiration, and then fed by encouragement, fun and recognition of accomplishment, are the ones that last. And these communities are the ones that I want to be part of.

Running a Successful User Group

running a successful user group

After the People For Geeks talk, I presented “Running a Successful User Group” with Gabrielle Roth on Wednesday. You can find our slides and our presentation handout over on Bacon and Tech. The handout is pretty cool, take a minute and print it out!

PostgreSQL Conference – Keynote commentary

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. 🙂