It's now the morning of the second day of FOSDEM, and my third day in Brussels. Right now, we have a talk from Gabriele Bartolini about the Italian PUG. Yesterday was packed with several good talks from a lot of different people, and a really packed booth. I've never seen a pg booth that had this many people or this much stuff (flyers, folders, t-shirts, mugs, those lovely elephants, pins, etc etc). Lots of visitors, and lots of interesting questions.
Outside the conference, I arrived on thursday evening, and was picked up at the airport by Susanne (thanks a bunch!). Met up with Bruce and Luke Momjian at the hotel, and went to dinner with a couple of MySQL guys (one which happened to be Susannes boyfriend, which I guess explains some of the connection there..). On friday we did some touristing around Brussels, and I took the chance to do some pg work while Bruce fell asleep more or less in the middle of a sentence - I guess we blame jetlag... Susanne was off to pick up Stefan at the airport, but since he gave her his departure time instead of arrival time, the day ended up being a bit delayed...
For the evening, we met up with a whole lot of other people (Dave, Greg, Heikki, Simon, Gevik, David, and several more) for our own beer event since the experience from previous years says that the big FOSDEM one is just too crowded. Had dinner at the same place.... Food and drink was good, but it was a bit of a boring atmosphere. On the other hand, the company was good and the discussions interesting...
Second day had us setting up our two tables in the booth in the morning, stacking it with all our nice merchandise. We sold a lot of things during the whole day, and pretty much ran out of the cool plush elephants. Most of the time the booth was packed with both PostgreSQL people manning it and visitors interested in talking to the PostgreSQL people, reading through our flyers, or buying our stuff.
In the afternoon, the talks in the devroom started. David Fetter was off with the keynote which was good, but some of it was lost because he never got the projector working properly from his laptop. This was followed up by an interesting talk by Stefan on the PostgreSQL infrastructure (ok, I knew most of that, but it was still good!). Simon gave a talk on some of the new performance features in 8.3, and he really could've used much more time to go through more of them - there are just so many things to talk about in that area. Bruce finished off the days pg talks by a repeat of his "Decade of PostgreSQL" talk that he did in Toronto - always a good talk.
In the evening we filed out to a restaurant fairly close to the hotel - the biggest problem was finding one that actually had space for all of us. We ended up at an Italian place that actually also served some Belgian specialties. Some people went home from that, and the rest of us ended up having some beers and chatting about PostgreSQL, The World and Everything.
Now off to focus on todays talks. And get ready for my own, which is later on during the day.
...is not over yet. There are still things to go. But I've finished off my two talks (one on "win32 development in a unix project" (no, there was no code at all in this) and one on "building search.postgresql.org" (very little code in this one). I think they went reasonably well, we'll see what others say when I check around some more...
Not quite as many people came to our booth today, at least not the time I was there, but there were still a lot of people. We had more talks instead, so I'd still classify the day as a big success.
Gabriele kicked off in the morning with an interesting talk, that unfortunately didn't have as many visitors as it deserved, because it was early in the morning (9AM).
Bruce had a talk about the PostgreSQL future, which probably wasn't what people expected. I think most people were expecting a roadmap for 8.4, which isn't at all what we received - but it was still a good talk.
Susanne did her encoding talk and a talk on how people can contribute to the PostgreSQL community. Unfortunately, I missed both of those. David also had a talk about DBI-link that I also missed - some people had to man the booth, and since there was no scheduled time for lunch some talks simply had to be skipped.
Simon has had one talk, focusing on enterprise features that he will be working on to get into the next version(s) of PostgreSQL, and he just started his second talk which is on the topic of high availability. He also arranged a short "roundtable discussion" with the BSD folks on what they could do in the OS to help PostgreSQL. Nothing concrete from such a short meeting of course, but hopefully it laid some foundation for more work in the future.
We had an auction for one of the big elephants, which really didn't end up where we expected it - because we had only a single bidder. Probably the timing could've been a lot better since there were talks going on - we need to think about that one next time.
In about half an hour it's time for the vote for the first board of directors for the new PostgreSQL Europe organization. Going to be interesting to see how that works out, and of course what the end result of it is.
Latest comments