ruby

the wifi at the hotel went into the toilet yesterday, so I am again doing my wrap-up during the morning keynote. generally i don't mind this, but i've found it makes for more fuzzy memory (example; that place i went for lunch is called downtown pizza, not the boiler room). hopefully you'll gloss over these discrepencies (this works for perez, hopefully it will for me). anyway, heres the wrapup from thursday...






last year kathy sierra did a keynote that i thought was awesome, this year they had another one focused on branding and open source. i always think people need to pay more attention to the aspect of marketing projects, so having oreilly bring this topic in front of everybody is really great. i sum it up with the question, what does the word postgresql describe to you?



after the keynotes i went down and did booth duty for an hour or so. we had plenty of people to handle this so i alternated between working the postgresql booth and talking to a few other people who support postgresql in thier endevors, like apress and xtuple (where i finally got to meet Ned Lily IRL as the kids say).



i managed to sneak out of the booth and into david fetters pl[perl|ruby] talk, which was really a pl/perl talk due to the short notice he had to prepare, some issues around pl/ruby, and david's general inclination for perl. Unfortunatly I think a number of ruby folks were disappointed by this, as a couple of people left during the talk, but I think most people were able to get some ideas on the flexibility that postgresql's pl support gives you.



following fetters talk, i went to lunch with the emma and mailer mailer folks. it was pretty uneventful (no fights broke out) and the general consensus was the food was as good as the day before, but it was better than the sandwhiches from earlier this week.



after lunch i went to the ingres "databases dont matter" talk, which was in the corporate shtick section of the conference. i had planned to try to stay incognito, but sitting in front with a postgresql shirt and fetter next to me turned out to be a poor way to accomplish that goal. i think it might have intimidated the speaker a little to have some postgres guys sitting in front of her, but she handled it well (luckily there was only a "we like to bash oracle" slide, and no "we like to bash postgres" slide!). her central message was a little fuzzy, but she provided a nice analogy comparing databases to plumbing, noting they are both best whent they are invisible, available, reliable, and scalable. for me this analogy actually somes up how much databases matter to folks, they really dont care about them (how many of you attend plumbing conventions) even though they are critical to our daily lives. (for those that need further evidence, when asked how many people use mysql for data they dont care about, at least a half dozen people raised thier hands). The one real disappointment to the talk was that i didnt manage to get a tshirt... i dont have any ingres tshirts so would have been nice to add one... maybe next year.



after that i swang into a php graphing talk, which took a stab at explaining different graphing solution available in php. i think i would have liked to see more discussion on specific php extension, but all in all i thought it was interesting stuff and i got a few things to think about (i've been doing a fair amount of pg stats graphing lately).



following that was more mingling up until my pl/php talk, where i finally got to meet michal kimsal just by random chance of luck. pl/php is a pretty niche topic and it was the last track of the day, so turn-out was a little low, but i think the talk went well, and i got some good questions afterwards so hopefully we'll see an expansion of that community with a few new members.



once my talk was done a number of us went up to burgerville (yikes!) for dinner, followed by a return to the convention center for the postgresql bof. since my name was on the bof page, i did a quick ramble and then quickly handed off to nasby and berkus who gave a nice presentation on upcoming things in 8.3. bonus points to this presentation for pulling jeff davies out of the audience to explain a feature he had worked on; bet you didn't see that coming eh jeff? a nice thanks to apress and omniti for supplying some give-aways (books and shirts), which we distributed through some rousing rounds of roku.



following that i hit up a few parties, did some mingling, and then had a surreal conversation with one of the zimba guys that convinced me zimbras real goal is not to provide an exchange replacement, but instead meant to build a global network for syphoning off stalkerazi pictures from the emails of users worldwide. sadly this was not the most uncomfortable conversation i was in this week... ah, go oscon!

I've been trying to get this post out for the last few days without success, but I figure I better get it out now before anythng too exciting happens for 2007. The idea behind the post was to gather a list of items that I saw as significant occurences in my life for 2006; it's not a complete list neccessarily, but pretty good look at things. To that end:

30
In January I turned 30. Really this isn't a big deal to me, but in general society thinks it is important, so it's probably worth noting.

The Book
February saw the release of [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590595475?tag2=zillablog-20 Begining PHP and PostgreSQL 8], a book I co-authored with [http://www.wjgilmore.com/ Jason Gilmore]. Writing a novel is something everyone says they want to do in thier life, and for me this was certainly the way I wanted to go about marking off that todo item on my life list.

pgsummit
Early July saw the 10 year Anniversary, which included my first trip back to Toronto in more than 10 years to attend the [http://trends.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/07/10/1723251&from=rss postgresql developers summit]. The highlight was of course getting to meet a whole bunch of people I'd none online for years.

spi participation
Shortly after the annivesary I was elected as the spi board observer for the postgresql project. To date we haven't done alot with our SPI membership, but I think it has brought PostgreSQL some positive exposure within the FLOSS community, and has given us some structure to move forward on several advocacy efforts.

oscon
Rounding out July was another trip to Portland. This wasn't my first oscon, but presenting on Ruby rather than PostgreSQL gave it a whole new spin, plus having Dave Thomas, among others, sitting in the back of the presentation was certainly a bonus.

Dylan starts school
My 5 year old started kindergarden, and after a year of pre-school (kudos to vpk) that was fairly rocky, kindergarden was even worse. Had things stayed as they were I don't know how things would have turned out, but fortunatly life was about to change for the better.

OmniTi
In September I agreed to pack my bags and move to Maryland to work at OmniTi. One of the big factors in coming was the chance to work with some really smart people on a regular basis, but I was pleasently surprised to see the caliber of talent extend beyond the "name" employees out to the whole staff. Plus there's the odd similarity to how I got hired by OmniTi and how I got married which I get to sit back and think about.

PHP/DB|Works
Technically I went to php/db|works before I started working at OmniTi, but it was after my last day at WebMD. International travel tip #1: Never tell the customs agent you're unemployed when they ask you what your job is. In any case, I again got to visit Toronto and met a whole bunch more people whom I had always wanted to meet, I got to speak on plphp, and was all around impressed with the conference crew; I'll have to do another php conference before long.

google soc summit
In October I went to Mountain View for the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit on behalf of the PostgreSQL project. Again I met lots of interesting people (see a theme here?) and swapped a lot of good ideas which I hope to help put into action at the next Summer of Code. Also of note it was my first time at Google, a place I strongly recommend any tech developer check out should they get the opportunity.

worked the booth at LISA
Though I had been to several conferences this year, I hadn't done much booth duty for some time, but since LISA was local I thought it wasa good opportunity to pitch in some help (and meet some new folks, but you're sick of that line by now). I enjoyed the conference, but probably more memorable was the subway system and my walk through some back alleys to the out of the way parking lot I ended up in in Silver Springs...

ppa 4.1 beta
So normally a beta release would not be a significant mile stone, but with Chris leaving the project (and leaving me in charge) while I was in the midst of an interstate move, we passed the one year mark between releases and I really wanted to get that thing out so people could see there was some life in the project. I made it just under the gun, and I'm happy to say since the beta we've gotten some bug reports and some nice cleanup work being done which helps make it all worthwhile; now we just need to get those translations updated.

So that about rounds out 2006; looking back no wonder I felt so compressed for time. And what about 2007? I'm on the hook to help out with pgcon and I've been thinking about working on another book project, but otherwise I've no concrete plans, which is probably OK, since I didn't have any at the start of 2006 either.

Over the weekend the PostgreSQL folks [http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-announce/2006-11/msg00022.php released] their first release candidate for the new 8.2 release. This does not mean they believe they have a bug free release yet, but rather that the current test pool was not sufficient in size/width/depth to uncover any lingering bugs that may, or may not, still exist. I know that I have done some testing on some internal applications and I suspect others are doing the same, but I haven't heard much in the way of other open source projects that are testing against 8.2. The [http://www.php.net/ PHP] folks have a nice idea where different projects are emailed about upcoming releases so they can do testing before the actual release, but what I don't see is where this information is quantified and visible for users to see... I guess with regards to PostgreSQL I'd like to see an application matrix akin to the [http://buildfarm.postgresql.org/cgi-bin/show_status.pl buildfarm], only with different applications. For example, I've tested both [http://phppgadmin.sourceforge.net/ PhpPgAdmin] and [http://people.planetpostgresql.org/xzilla/index.php?/archives/274-Pagila-ok-on-8.2.html Pagila] against 8.2, but haven't yet tested [http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki mediawiki] or [http://www.s9y.org/ s9y] against it, or any [http://rubyonrails.com/ RoR] apps for that matter... if someone else has that would save me the trouble, but only if I know about it. I think this would be helpful to others too, though I don't really see anything similar to it in the open source world, but in any case if you have tested an open source application against PostgreSQL 8.2, I'd love to hear about it.

[note: I'm sitting here in the portland airport saturday night, getting ready to catch the red-eye back east to gainsville. I meant to post this Friday afternoon, but got caught up in other activities. It's the final notes on OSCON, I hope you enjoy it]



After wheelers talk I attempted to sit in on the perl hacks you never knew talk, but decided I didn't know them for good reason, bailed out, and went to the PHP patterns talk. George gave a ince overview of the concept of patterns and why they are so popular with OO programming. One snafu that occured was, during the talk, his im client popped up a message during talk... thats awkward... and why i dont even connect to the network when I do my talks (george's dog is doing well by the way). Mostly he went over classical patterns like the singlton, iterator, and factory pattern. It was interesting enough, though I think a little more emphasis on why people should use patterns would have been good.



After that it was back out for the final keynote from Eblin Moglin. He'sa lawyer, so he tends to drag on at time, but it was good to here someone remind how important the free software movement is beyond open source. It was unfortunate the he also butchered the meaning of Tim ORielly's "are licenses obsolete" catch phrase, a trend that occured several times over the past week, but his point was important (freedom is more important than open standards) and hopefully reminded a few people of this side of the open source equation. I certainly give a tip of the hat to O'Rielly, noted pragmatists in the open source movement, for including him in the conference.



Overall I have to say this was another fine conference from O'Reilly. It has it's share of warts (the length of breaks, some of the speakers were sketchy, and the wireless got spotty in places) but no where else can you meet such a wide range of people all centered on pushing forward open source technology.



The PostgreSQL angle was a little bitter sweet for me. There were highlights, like the fact that I recognized so few postgresql users at the BOF (a good sign usage is expanding) and that the booth had a steady flow of traffic, but there were also some downers, such as the postgresql track not being terribly exciting (some of this may be summit hangover) and the somewhat sour state of the postgresql job market (based on pervasives announcement, the orielly trends talk, and my own personal conversations with people). Right now there is a shortage of postgresql dba's, and yet not a lot of choices for postgresql dba's either. I think we need to figure out how to get oracle/db2/mssql dba's to take an interest in getting postgresql knowledge, but I don't see anyone making much of an effort in this area. I suppose that's not really conference specific, but it's something I came awaywith because of the conference, so for that reason I lump it all together.



Will I be back? I hope so. This year I spoke on Ruby on Rails, and I really enjoyed it. I hope to speak again next year too, so I'm already kicking some ideas around for them. Unless you have the right connections, you need to be flexible on the conference circuit, so being prepared is a must in this quick changing world of open source. Hopefully the rest of you will start planning fornext year as well [[image /xzilla/templates/default/img/emoticons/smile.png alt=":-)" style="display: inline; vertical-align: bottom;" class="emoticon" /]]

Man, it has been such a busy week I haven't had time to keep up. After my talk yesterday I chatted with a few ruby/rails users on the way to the PostgreSQL Time Travel tables talk. It has some nifty ideas, I might have to do a [http://pgfoundry.org/projects/dbsamples/ pagila] based article on it just to play with it.



After that blew off the out joins talk to go see the marketing to Dilbert talk. The idea of the talk was how to get developers interested in your project. Since I'm involved in a number of projects and also want more developers, I thought it would be interesting. Unfortunately it was really oriented towards companies, so it didn't do a lot for me, though one nugget of wisdom they had was the idea that "marketing creates monopoly". His example was that the microsoft folks were good marketers, and now they have a monopoly. I can think of some open source projects that also won their markets with a lot of marketing, and now are the dominate player.



After that I went to Christopher Browne's PostgreSQL performance tuning talk. While it wasn't exactly exciting, it was the type of deep technical information a PostgreSQL user might come to a conference.




Following that went to the free-software in Venezuela talk, which had an interesting overview of how open source is taking hold in that country (and being funded by the government no less). One thing I had to wonder about was, with all of that activity going on, do we have any PostgreSQL user groups or advocates working in that country?



After that I went to the Art of Community lightening talks. It was somewhat interesting though not earth shattering... the more unfortunate thing being that it ran over a bit, giving me no time between the talk and the PostgreSQL BOF to get dinner. Chris Browne and I order a pizza from the nebulous "Kustom Pizza" which turned out to be good, but at $30 seemed a bit overpriced.



The PostgreSQL BOF actually turned out to be pretty good. We discussed a number of hot topics including Pervasives recent announcement, Sun's new entry into PostgreSQL, the PostgreSQL Summit, and some upcoming features for 8.2. We also took some questions from the crowd, and then did a book giveaway involving a number of books from [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0672327562/sr=8-1/qid=1154109686/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-0410869-2941514?ie=UTF8 Sam's] and [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590595475/sr=8-4/qid=1154109686/ref=pd_bbs_4/104-0410869-2941514?ie=UTF8 Apress] [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590594789/sr=8-2/qid=1154109686/ref=pd_bbs_2/104-0410869-2941514?ie=UTF8 Publishing].



After I got out of the pg bof, I went to the gpg bof, but I hadn't brought my gpg key cards, and was too tired to actually write my key out properly (I tried, and kept coming up one number short).



From there I was trying to decide which party/gathering to head to when I stumbled upon a friendly little poker game. With [http://www.sqlite.org/index.html Richard Hipp] busting out, I hopped into the open seat, doling out some left over pizza to help flesh out my short stack. We played a mix of Omaha, Texas Hold 'Em, 7 card hi lo, and a quick round of "between the sheets". I hadn't ever played between the sheets before, so I was a bit nervous, but after someone showed when to go in and and pull out, I was able to fake my way through it enough to get a big payoff at the end.



After poker I was bushed, so headed back to the hotel and promptly passed out. Luckily I had waffles to look forward to in the morning, so I was able to drag myself out of bed this morning and make it on down for the keynotes.



Friday keynotes tend to be pretty good and this year was no exception. The first speaker discussed some of the history of early IBM computers; something I was afraid would be horrendously dry and boring but which turned out to be pretty entertaining. After that was a talk on open source interaction wrt the government. One low hanging fruit of mention was pestering the government over bad html and broken links, which seem to be all too common a problem with govt. sites which should be able to hire decent web masters. The last hurrah though was Damian Conway's cXap talk, which was hilarious. This was probably the best of the keynotes (Sierras being the main contender), there are already photos up on flickr for those interested.



The rest of the morning will consist of David Wheelers OR mapping talk which I went to mainly since I saw this talk last year, and needed some place to get caught up on blogging. (Yep, it's going on right now) and then 1 more before the closing keynotes. For those with time on your hands, dig around and see if you can find some info on solaris and the gpl [[image /xzilla/templates/default/img/emoticons/smile.png alt=":-)" style="display: inline; vertical-align: bottom;" class="emoticon" /]]

So after dinner last night, I swang (swung?) back into the conference to watch the nightly events. First up where several open source awards, some of which were pearl related, including an award for our very own [http://www.stonehenge.com/ Randall Schwartz].



Following the awards was the "state of the onion" talk from Larry Wall. I'm not

a pearl monger really, but Larry is a good speaker and these talks tend to be much more entertaining than your typical "state of" talk. It was replete with geek humor, including digs on php and poking fun at ruby. It was all in good spirit though, so I'm glad I swung (swang?) in for it.



After that was the real highlight of the night; the "building passionate users" talk.


I've been a fan of [http://headrush.typepad.com/ Kathy Sierra] for awhile now, and hearing her presentation was huge for me. Hopefully other members of the PostgreSQL community were in attendance, one thing we do not do is build passionate users. (MySQL OTOH does a great job of this) Some of the things she discussed were the idea of getting people passed the suck threshold quickly (ruby/rails does an amazing job of this) but I don't see much that we do for this. Some of the current rumbling about what to package with the core, or how to direct people on the web, center around this principal, though I don't know if people are cognizant of that. One other area she touched on was the idea of open source projects and tribalism; where you get your users to feel like part of the community, and showing your community flags becomes a highlight for people. Again, we don't do this in PostgreSQL; consider how many companies are using PostgreSQL that would rather talk about [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_club#_note-2rules fight club] than tell people they use PostgreSQL. I could go on about this really; I'm a bit of a community building addict (before pg I help run a popular community run fantasy sports website, and before that I ran the unofficial 5th edition card list page for magic the gathering players), and it's something I have been trying to expand more within (and outside of) our community; with web development, hacking on s9y, hacking on mediawiki, and other things. I've yet to find a benefactor that realized how important this is within the community; I bet things [http://www.pervasive-postgres.com/letter.asp would have been different for Pervasive] if they had.



Anyway, after the passionate users talk was Damian Conway's "The Davinci Codebase" talk. This was now the third Damian Conway talk I had been too, but Damian doesn't get old. The talk was basically a parody of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davinci_code the davinci code], and was quite funny, sometimes due to geek humor, and sometimes due to the geeks who found it humorous. Afterwards I headed back to the hotel to do some more talk tweaking.



Right now I'm sitting in Tim O'Rielly's keynote... Tim always gives interesting things to think about... after that will be Theo Schlossonagles (sp?) talk on PostgreSQL, followed by booth duty and lunch. If I have time I'll recap some of the meta-conference things that went on this morning... stay tuned folks [[image /xzilla/templates/default/img/emoticons/smile.png alt=":-)" style="display: inline; vertical-align: bottom;" class="emoticon" /]]

Well, managed to get through my first day of the [http://conference.postgresql.org/ summit]; here's the quick rundown:



A few of us bypassed the continental breakfast and grabbed some real food at the Reyerson before heading over. The first talk was Bruce's keynote, which gave a bit of history of how postgresql got from berkely to the internet, including a few humorous emails from way back when. Light and fun and a nice way to kick off the conference.



After that I swung into [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0672327562/104-1348632-0282317?v=glance&n=283155 Korry Douglas'] talk on the plpgsql debugger. The basic idea was a add-on/contrib style program the hooks into the back-end to allow you to debug plpgsql functions; setting breakpoints and stepping through functions, which variable information displayed as you go. The architecture was pretty neat, allowing for a 3rd party API interface so that tools like phpPgAdmin could make use of the debugger. The way it integrated with the backend was good too, involving a serious of hooks that tied into the function language code. This means that implementation in PostgreSQL is extremely compact (about 10 lines of code), allowing for simplicity as well as minimal impact on performance when not in use. This also means that these hooks can be put to other uses, for example a function tracer and profiler, both of which Korry had already put together. This is one of the projects being worked on by EnterpriseDB and should be made available soon. While it might not all be there for 8.2, Tom thought the hooks stood a good chance of getting in, which means all of the other tools could be put to use as 3rd party components to 8.2 after release.



Next up I went to the lightening talks session. There was a lot of good information in there... highlights included too presentations by [http://www.skype.net Skype] about horizontal scaling of PostgreSQL and custom replication. Skype is a great example of what you cn do if you have innovative programmers and the power and flexibility that only PostgreSQL can give you. Hiroshi gave a pointer to his work on an snmp agent, which is [http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgsnmpd/ currently up on pgfoundry]. Devrim also gave a quick run-through of his replication / gfs / failover system, something I haven't fully gotten around, but it looks spiffy. It ended on David's odd talk about object - relational mapping... I didn't quite see where he was going with it (he ran out of time) but my guess it it would have ended with an endorsement of [http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/ActiveRecord Active Record and Ruby on Rails].



After that the web team (+ alvarro and thomas hallgren) went out and we grabbed some Thai food. I got mine "are you sure?" hot... it was hot, but not too hot.



When we got back I swung into the Introduction to Hacking talk. The best part was probably that I got to introuce myself to Gavin Sherry. Given the number of times I have pestered him about relocating me to Australia, it was nice to actually meet the guy [[image /xzilla/templates/default/img/emoticons/smile.png alt=":-)" style="display: inline; vertical-align: bottom;" class="emoticon" /]] The talk itself was excellent too... Gavin and Niel have an uncanny presentation style, finishing each others sentences at time it flowed so well. If you're a company that wants to customize PostgreSQL to build your business, hiring these two guys to come and talk to your development team would be a huge bonus. Unfortunatly I had to bail out before the end in order to attend the Advocacy meeting, but what I saw was great, and those whom I talked to afterward we're pretty jazzed.



The advocacy talk consisted of the folks at [http://www.postgresql.jp/ JPUG] and postgresqfr giving a run-down of what they have been up to. Japan is really got it all together, it fantastic to see thier success, though I little frustrating that we haven't been able to duplicate that success in the U.S. Josh as gave a run-down of the current things happening with the [http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-advocacy/2006-06/msg00117.php SPI group] (vote for Rob!) and then presented his idea for a unified donor section of the website. He and I have talked about this before and I think on the whole it is pretty solid, but we did get some solid feedback, hopefully we can move on that soon.



Well... time for the contributors dinners... I'll update this post later with links for those interested. otherwise will blog more tommorrow barring anything crazy happening tonight.



[updated] dinner ran a bit long, but I've updated with links... more tomorrow.