Spring/Summer 2015 Conference Schedule

What follows is my conference travel schedule through the early summer.  I'm posting it so that local PUGs will know when I'm going to be nearby, in case you want me to come talk to your members.  Also, so folks can find me at conference booths everywhere.

This list is also for anyone who was unaware of the amount of Postgres content available this year at conferences everywhere.

• SCALE, Los Angeles, this week: 2-day Postgres track, booth.  Use code "SPEAK" if you still haven't registered for a small discount.  I'm speaking on 9.4 (Friday), and PostgreSQL on AWS (Sunday).
• March 10, Burlingame, CA: pgDay SF 2015 Running the event, and a lightning talk.
• March 25-27, NYC, NY: pgConf NYC: speaking on PostgreSQL on PAAS: a comparison of all the big ones.
• April 25-26, Bellingham, WA: LinuxFest NorthWest, tentatively.  Talks haven't been chosen yet.  If I go, I'll also be working a booth no doubt.  I understand there are plans to have a bunch of Postgres stuff at this event.
• June 16-20, Ottawa, Canada: pgCon of course.
• July 20-24, Portland, OR: OSCON (tentatively, talks not selected).  Postgres talk of some sort, and probably booth duty.

Now you know.

A statement on recent conference events

The PostgreSQL user group in Moscow is currently conducting their first-ever PostgreSQL-themed conference, which has been a tremendous success.  Unfortunately, the venue booked by the conference chose to include inappropriate dancers as part of their entertaiment package. The conference organizers and the Russian PostgreSQL community were not aware of the nature of the entertainment supplied ahead of time.

The PostgreSQL Core Team believes there is no place for inappropriate or discriminatory behaviour at PostgreSQL conferences and tries to ensure that all our conferences are suitable for anyone to attend. As PostgreSQL is an Open Source project with volunteer contributors and a federated organizational structure, we do not have supervisory control over how individual conferences are organized, which means that sometimes they do not benefit from general community experience.

The Russian conference organizers are expected to comment on this unforseen incident once the conference is concluded. The international community will be working with them to make sure that this mistake is not repeated.

Josh Berkus
On Behalf of the PostgreSQL Core Team
and the PostgreSQL Global Development Project

pgDay SF 2015 Call For Speakers/Sponsors now open

pgDay SF 2015, to be held March 10th in Burlingame, CA, now has its Call for Speakers open.  The event is also looking for sponsors.  Come join us and meet even more Postgres folks!

Upcoming Seattle Visit

I will be in Seattle soon on business.  This will include two opportunties to do PostgreSQL community stuff:

• A meetup with SEAPUG on the 12th, where I will talk about the upcoming 9.4 features.
• A BOF at Usenix LISA where I talk about the same, only to a different crowd.

If you're in the Seattle area, come chat!  We'll go out to Dilletante and have chocolate!

Portland schedule, revised

Just so folks know:  due to unsurmountable issues, I will not make it to DjangoCon this year.  My apologies for anyone who was planning on attending my sessions there.  However, I will be at both the Portland pgDay and FOSS4G.  See you in Portland, just later.

Pending Portland Postgres Presentations

This year is apparently my year to spend most of my time in Portland.  Maybe I should move there ;-)  Please read through if you are in Portland or are attending conferences in Portland for a list PostgreSQL-related events there.

O'Reilly OSCON 2014: on Monday, July 21st, I will be presenting The Accidental DBA again at OSCON.  O'Reilly has asked me to reprise this tutorial as it was sold out last year.  This tutorial covers the care and feeding of a PostgreSQL server for people whose main job is something else, or for those new to database administration.  Will include multiple hands-on exercises using Vagrant on your own laptop.  The exercises are on github, but will be updated on or before July 10th in order to cover 9.3 and feedback from the last talk.

Note that there will also be a special PDXPUG meeting or BOF at OSCON; details TBD.  I will also be doing an Office Hours session at OSCON on July 22nd at 3:20 PM; please bring your questions about PostgreSQL scalability and replication.

I am likely to be speaking at DjangoCon.us in September.  As the Call for Presentations is still open, I don't know what it will be about, or have confirmation that I will, in fact, be speaking.

Right between DjangoCon.us and FOSS4G, PDXPUG will be hosting a full PostgreSQL Day at Portland State University on September 6.  This event is free, so if you are going to either DjangoCon or FOSS4G, extend your stay in Portland in order to attend!  RSVP required.

People are still submitting presentations for that; if you're interested in speaking, contact Mark per the wiki page.  I expect to be talking about 9.4, replication, or maybe Postgres on Amazon.

Finally, at FOSS4G, I will be doing a full day of Postgres/PostGIS workshops.  In the morning I will do Accidental DBA again, this time tailored for PostGIS administrators.  In the afternoon, I will do a hands-on "learning to do PostGIS replication" tutorial.  This does mean that I will likely not include much about replication in the morning session.  Both of these workshops are "bring your own device", which means that you will need to install the tutorial materials on your laptop in advance.

Since I will be spending the first half of September in Portland.  If you or your company is interested in onsite training or consulting during September, please get in touch with PGX.

Hop Aboard The PgPy Train

Are you going to both NYC PgConf and PyCon? Join me and hopefully other PostgreSQL geeks aboard the Adirondack Train on April 7th to Montreal.  We'll travel to Montreal, sight see for a couple days, and then attend PyCon! The train has wifi, coffee, snacks, and drinks, and rolls past the beautiful Hudson River Valley.

I'm thinking we take over the lounge for a 9.4 beta-testing hack session. Or just hang out and talk FDWs and high availability.

Contact me at josh@postgresql.org for more information, or just buy your April 7th tickets on the Adirondack Train!  Tickets are just $67.

pgCon Submissions: give us a description!

So I'm about 2/3 of the way through evaluating the pgCon submissions so that we can choose talks.  The good thing is that we have an amazing bunch of interesting talks, including genomics, e-government, big data, security, extensions, administration, and of course 9.4 stuff.  The bad thing is that a lot of speakers this year submitted one-sentence proposals, so they are getting rejected.  And that's sad, since those speakers probably have awesome stuff to present, but if we don't have a description, how can we tell?

In several cases, I get the impression that because the speakers are well-known community members, they expect us to trust them that they have a good topic.  The problem with that reasoning is that we're not going to bump a new speaker with an interesting topic and a well-prepared talk outline against an old hand with a proposal which reads "something cool here".  This year, there's 97 proposals for 32 slots, so we're going to take the best of the best.

So ... if you submitted a one-sentence talk proposal: there's still 3 days of voting left.  Update the proposal ASAP, and let us know you've done so!  (pgcon-committee@lists.pgcon.org)

Speaker training at Linux Collab, LinuxCon

Are you a first-time speaker?  Have you noticed most of the audience checking their email during your talks?  Are you speaking to a mostly-empty room, and not getting invited back to conferences?  Do you walk out of the room thinking "that could have gone better"?  Are you a brilliant technology inventor, yet at a loss when standing in front of an audience?  Are you just regularly speaking at conferences, but have never attended a speaker training before?

If the answer to any of the above is "yes", then you need to attend my speaker training at the Linux Collab Summit or at LinuxCon this year.  I'll be reprising "Give A Great Tech Talk", the speaker training Ian Dees and I developed for Open Source Bridge -- with some improvements, additions and advances, of course!  This session is strongly recommended for all new speakers by the Linux Foundation, and even experienced speakers can pick up a few useful tips.

Since we'll have a longer timeslot for this than we did at Open Source Bridge, I'll be doing more audience exercises.  If you're attending, please bring your notes and slides for some of your own presentations, and we'll work on them.

See you there.
  

PyPgDay Sold Out

As of yesterday, the first PyPgDay is sold out.  We're expecting between 130 and 140 attendees, which isn't bad at all for a one-day, one-track conference.   If you haven't registered already, sorry!  We've also added a fundraising raffle, thanks to Mark Wong making us another uber-cute elephant, so bring your cash.  Drawing will be held at the Salesforce party.

Too bad PyCon is in Montreal next year; we'll have to find another way to do a Bay Area Postgres event in 2014.

Speakers, Sponsors chosen for PyPgDay

The PyPgDay committee has selected the speakers and talks for PyPgDay 2013.  We have an awesome program for you, including talks about monitoring, scaling, performance, Python application development, Django and mobile applications, and speakers from Disqus, Apsalar, VMware, 2ndQuadrant and Uber.  While we can't give you everything you want to know about PostgreSQL and Python in one day, we can certainly give you a lot.

You also want to register soon, because registration is already 50% full.

Check out the list of speakers on the draft schedule.  We may reorder them from here, but the talks and speakers are pretty solid.  We still have room for some lightning talks.

PyPgDay is presented by Disqus.

The PyPgDay Party Sponsor is Salesforce.com.  The Wifi Sponsor is Heroku.com.  PyPgDay is sponsored by Urban Mapping, Uber.com, TransLattice, PostgreSQL Experts, Pandora.com, File-Away.UK and Apsalar.

Coming up: pgDay LA

For those who missed the memo, on Friday, February 22nd there will be a full day of PostgreSQL talks at Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE). 

I will be there, once again doing my "9.2 Grand Prix" talk, hopefully for the last time.  I also plan to do "The Seven Deadly Sins of Software Deployment" for UpScale Friday evening.

Incidentally, I plan to drive down to SCALE, so if anyone from the SF Bay Area wants a ride, please contact me (josh -at- agliodbs.com).

Party with Postgres and Salesforce at PyPgDay

We're still working on the program and sponsors for PyPgDay, but I thought I'd let you know about the fun part of it: Salesforce.com is sponsoring a post-PyPgDay party! 

The party will be at Fault Line Brewing, which means either driving from the convention center (it's a couple miles away) or taking the bus, which Salesforce.com is also sponsoring.  You'll need a PyPgDay badge or t-shirt to get in, or a PyCon badge.  PyPgDay attendees will have priority if we run out of room, but ask!

Come party with us.

As always, details about PyPgDay are on the wiki page.

Registration now open for PyPgDay

Registration is open now for the PyPgDay.  Register early and register often!

We are also still looking for speakers and sponsors.

In addition to giving you access to a solid day of PostgreSQL, PostGIS and Python development content, your registration fee gets you a cool tshirt custom-designed for the PyPgDay and priority access to the afterparty.  Early registration rates are in effect through February 28.  We will have a full schedule for the PyPgDay up sometime in mid-February.

Yes, we are requiring a paid registration for this event.  One reason for that is that PyPgDay is not free for SFPUG: we need to pay for room rental, catering, A/V, insurance, staffing and other expenses.  More importantly, we've found that free registrations are not reliable, and we expect that the event may sell out.  Event volunteers and speakers, of course, may attend the PyPgDay for free.

Net proceeds from the event will be split between PostgreSQL.US (a 501(c)3 nonprofit supporting the PostgreSQL community) and the SFPUG Meetings Fund. 

Also, before anyone asks:  No, PyCon is not underwriting the cost of the PyPgDay.  Frankly, we didn't even ask them to: they are non-profit, same as us, and they have their own project to support.

PyPgDay: Call For Sponsors

Does your company do Python and PostgreSQL or PostGIS?  Do you want to make a good impression on the PostgreSQL community?  Were you planning on attending PyCon anyway?

If so, you may want to sponsor our first-every PyPgDay on March 13th.  Sponsorships are due by February 28th.  We expect 90 to 140 attendees at this event, so it's decent publicity for a low, low price.  Net proceeds go to benefit the PostgreSQL community via PostgreSQL.US and the SFPUG Meetings Fund.

More information on the PyPgDay Wiki Page.

Of course, we want you to speak too!  Talk proposals are due by January 20th.

Save The Date: PyPgDay

PostgreSQL has become the "default database" of Python users everywhere.  And Python has become the most popular scripting language for Postgres.  So, to celebrate that, we're throwing a miniconference at PyCon 2013.

PyPgDay will be a full-day PostgreSQL event at PyCon this year, on March 13th (all day), at the Santa Clara Convention Center.  Watch the PyPgDay wiki page and this blog for updates on the event, as we get it organized.

In other event news, the Call For Papers for pgCon is now open.  Please submit your PostgreSQL hacking, development, performance, and advanced technique proposals.