Tuesday, June 02, 2009

PGCon2009 Summary

I'm back from PGCon2009. No, I didn't just get back. I've been back for a smidgen over a week now. When I first got there I decided I would blog daily about it, but time didn't permit me to write in any detail. So I decided I would make notes and summarize it all when I got back. The notes thing didn't pan out thanks to twitter. It was simply easier to tweet my thoughts as I thought them than collecting them in little text files and revisiting them later. The summary idea didn't work out either because (a) I didn't have any notes, and (b) all the good stuff was already said on Planet PostgreSQL. But it's been more than a week since the conference and people are still posting summaries so now I feel like I have to say something. Here goes!

Great conference, awesome people, awesome community, and PostgreSQL is really cool technology that I'm confident in trusting my [clients'] data with.

My only gripe with the conference was the keynote address. It's nobody's fault really. The original speaker couldn't make it so they had to slap something together at the last minute. It showed. At the time, my thought was, if the rest of the conference is like this it's going to suck!

...

As I write this I've just realized that the keynote incident is a metaphor for the larger PostgreSQL project. If you attended or watched the "How to Get Your Patch Accepted" talk, it is apparent that quickly slapping something together is not how the PostgreSQL code base is developed or maintained. So I shouldn't have been surprised that the keynote was not a valid indicator about the rest of the conference. I hope I haven't disparaged any of the speakers. They did their best and everyone else in the auditorium enjoyed their keynote.

1 comment:

  1. Hey Dane,

    Sorry about the keynote.

    I think the kindest review we got was that it should have been called "an overview".

    You're right: proper keynotes require advance preparation and should spark some kind of new and interesting thought that generates conversation in the group.

    If you missed the FluidDB talk and are interested in a novel approach to information relationships and management on the web, you should check out that talk. Particularly the first 20 minutes of it were very interesting. I mentioned to Dan (while I was watching it) that we really should have had Terry give the keynote. :)

    If you come across a topic or a speaker that you think would be good for next year's PgCon, please pass it along to either Dan or myself. I think what we learned this year is that we should always have a backup - which is true for keynotes and databases.

    -selena

    ReplyDelete