Summary of feedback from FOSDEM devroom

I forgot completely to close up the feedback system for our talks at FOSDEM and post the feedback to the speakers. My apologies to all speakers and others who were interested! Thankfully, Marc Balmer reminded me today and the individual ratings for different speakers have been sent off to them.

When it comes to the aggregated statistics, they look fairly similar to what we saw at PGDay. The number of speakers were much lower, and unfortunately so were the number of people giving feedback. But in the end, the results were fairly clear. I am especially happy with the level of knowledge in the speakers we attract. Let's start with the graphs:

Breaking down the details, I think this shows a great quality of our speakers:

Name | Speaker Quality | Votes | Deviation Simon Riggs | 4.8 | 6 | 0.4 Magnus Hagander | 4.6 | 5 | 0.5 David Fetter | 4.5 | 4 | 1 Heikki Linnakangas | 4.3 | 9 | 0.9 Dave Page | 4.2 | 10 | 1.0 Marc Balmer | 3.4 | 5 | 1.7 Peter Eisentraut | 3.3 | 7 | 1.0

And the level of their knowledge is even higher:

Name | Speaker Knowledge | Votes | Deviation Simon Riggs | 5 | 6 | 0 Magnus Hagander | 5 | 5 | 0 Heikki Linnakangas | 5 | 9 | 0 David Fetter | 4.8 | 4 | 0.5 Dave Page | 4.3 | 10 | 1.1 Peter Eisentraut | 4.3 | 7 | 1.1 || Marc Balmer || 3.6 || 5 || 1.7 ||

Even at the bottom of this list, the numbers are very good! Unfortunately, the fairly low number of votes give a high deviation at the bottom of the chart.

For next time, we'd really like to get more people to leave their feedback. Does anybody have a good idea on how to make that happen?

Time management by (somebody elses) press-releases

A while back I submitted a couple of talks for PG-East 2010 in Philly, and over the past couple of weeks I've been nagging the organizers semi-frequently to get some pre-info on whether I've been accepted or not, since flight prices started to climb fairly rapidly. The site clearly says information that the information will be available on Feb 15th, so I can't really complain that the answer kept being "don't know yet".

A couple of days ago, I got a note from Dave pinged me with a message asking if I was approved. Turns out this press-release had been posted (by his company, no less). Which explicitly names me as a speaker at the conference.

Took me two more days of chasing down JD, but I now have confirmation I'll be there. I don't actually know what I'll be speaking about, but it's a pretty safe bet it will be PostgreSQL related.

I call this Time management by press releases. If I could only get it to apply to all meetings, I would no longer need to keep my own calendar up to date.

So, I'll see you in Philly!

Feedback from pgday.eu

I've finally had the time to summarize the feedback we received from pgday.eu.

We received feedback from about 35 people, which is obviously way less than we were hoping for. Ideas for how to improve this for next time are very welcome! This also means that the figures we have are not very exact - but they should give a general hint about what our attendees thought.

I just sent out the individual session feedback summaries to each individual speaker. These will not be published - it's of course fine for each speaker to publish his own feedback if he wants to, but the conference organizers will not publish the detailed per-session data.

The statistics we do have show that most of our speakers did a very good job, and that the attendees were in general very happy with the sessions. We have also received a fairly large amount of comments - both to the conference and the speakers - which will help us improve specific points for next year!

I'll show a couple of graphs here with the total across all sessions and speakers. In these graphs, 5 is the highest score and 1 is the lowest.

The attendees also seemed to be very happy with our speakers, which is something I'm very happy to hear about. It's also good to see that almost nobody felt the speakers didn't know very well what they were talking about - always a worry with a conference that has so many experienced community people attending.

Actually trying to figure out which speaker is best using this data is very difficult. But here's a list of the top speakers based on speaker quality, who had more than 5 ratings on their talks. The list includes all speakers with an average score of at least 3.5. There are a lot more hovering around that line, but there has to be a cutoff somewhere... Again note that there are still not that many ratings to consider, so values are pretty unstable. I've included the standard deviation as well to make sure this is visible.

Place | Speaker | Score | Stddev | Num 1 | Gavin M. Roy | 4.9 | 0.5 | 18 2 | Guillaume Lelarge | 4.9 | 0.4 | 7 3 | Robert Hodges | 4.8 | 0.4 | 13 4 | Magnus Hagander | 4.8 | 0.4 | 20 5 | Jean-Paul Argudo | 4.8 | 0.5 | 8 6 | Joshua D. Drake | 4.6 | 0.7 | 9 7 | Simon Riggs | 4.6 | 0.6 | 17 8 | Dimitri Fontaine | 4.5 | 0.5 | 14 9 | Greg Stark | 4.3 | 0.5 | 8 10 | Vincent Moreau | 4.1 | 0.6 | 8 11 | Mark Cave-Ayland | 4.0 | 0.6 | 11 12 | David Fetter | 3.9 | 1.1 | 9 13 | Gabriele Bartolini | 3.7 | 1.0 | 15 14 | Heikki Linnakangas | 3.6 | 0.7 | 9

All of these are clearly very good numbers.

So once again, a big thanks to our speakers for their good work. And also a very big thanks to those who did fill out the session feedback forms - your input is very valuable!

Update: Yes, these graphs were made with a python script calling the Google Charts API. Does anybody know of a native python library that will generate goodlooking charts without having to call a remote web service?

My pgday.eu pictures are up

I've finally gotten around to uploading my pictures from PGDay.EU 2009 to [ my smugmug gallery].

Clearly the conference was tiring, and we all needed a rest... (yes, this was during JD's talk)

And as the picture says, don't forget to submit your feedback - the site is still open for that!

PGDay.EU 2009 - it's a wrap

I'm currently sitting on my flight home from Paris CDG, after a couple of very hectic days. It's going to be a couple of days (which in reality is going to drag out into a couple of weeks due to other work engagements and then travel for the JPUG conference) before it'll be possible to completely evaluate the conference and things around it, but here's what I have so far.

I'm going to leave the evaluation of the talks themselves to somebody else. There were many others of the "regular PostgreSQL bloggers" present at the conference and we've already seen some posts around it. Hopefully there will be more, both in French and English. If you are blogging about this and your blog isn't already up on Planet PostgreSQL, please consider adding it so that the community at large gets notification of your posts.

Continue reading

PGDay.EU day one

align="right" So, day one is almost finished, when it comes to the conference itself - and then it's off to the EnterpriseDB evening party. A quick summary of the day is: awesome.

Going into a little more detail, the day started with us actually getting up painfully early. Got to ParisTech in the morning, right as they opened up our room. I have to say the facilities at ParisTech have been great - the rooms are in great shape, perfect size, and all the A/V equipment is working perfectly. (Yes, there is a slight flicker on one of the projectors, but it's not bad).

I did the intro section with Jean-Paul, and there's really not much to say about that. We (well, I) forgot to add a slide about the feedback - oops. I bet that's one reason we don't have as much feedback entered yet as we'd like.

Simon took over with a keynote, which was very good. Simon is a very good speaker, and he found a good balance between technical and non-technical talks. It was a nice way to kick off the conference. At this time, we had somewhere between 125-150 people had shown up, which is definitely not bad.

I half-followed the English track after that, with talks about PostGIS and Data Warehousing, which were both very good talks. Also spent some time in the organization, which has really worked pretty smoothly. We've had a few minor issues, but they were all solved quickly.

Lunch was fantastic. Many thanks to our great caterers who served us an amazing lunch, with good organization, and more than enough food. Couldn't be better!

align="left" Watched Gavin's talk on scalability after lunch, which is always a good one. After that I had my own talk which went at least Ok, though I did finish a bit early. After that it was off to a pgadmin developer meeting, which is where I am now.

So I'd better go now, so I don't miss out on the activities.

PGDay.EU open for business

Yesterday we announced the schedule for PGDay.EU 2009. The Friday will have one track in English and one in French, and the Saturday will have two tracks in English and one in French. There are a lot of good talks scheduled - I wish I could trust my French enough to go see a couple of those as well...

We are also now open for registration. The cost of the conference is from €60 for a full price two day entry with discounts for single-day and for students. See the registration page for details. While we expect to be able to accommodate all interested people, if we are unable to do so those that register first will obviously be the ones we can take. We also prefer that you register as soon as you can if you know you're coming, since that makes our planning much easier.

pgcon photos

Just a quick note to let people know I have uploaded my [ photos from pgcon]. They're not as many as last year, and not really good, but there are at least some for people to look at :-)

I have only started tagging up names. If you know more of them, just drop me an email with photo link and name. Thanks!

pgcon is done

I'm currently sitting in Frankfurt Airport waiting for my connecting flight back home to Stockholm, and I figure this is a good time to sum up the rest pgcon that ended a couple of days ago.

The second day of talks, Friday, began with what must almost be called a developer keynote. PGDG "giants" Tom Land and Bruce Momjian gave a talk on how to get your patch accepted into PostgreSQL. I think they did a good job of showing some of the general thoughts that are behind this process in a good way. And it was fun to finally get to see Tom do a talk at one of these conferences...

After this I split a slot between the Wisconsin Courts talk and Selenas VACUUM talk, since I had to take a phonecall in the middle of the talk. Why does this always happen? Thus, didn't see enough of either talk to really make any comments..

After lunch I did the temporal data talk, but I admit to not following it too closely - not really something I was deeply interested in, but this was really the only time when there wasn't a talk in any of the tracks that really interested me.

In the last of the regular talks, I went to Gavin's talk about Golconde. Sounds like a very interesting piece of technology. I don't actually have any use-case for it at this time, but I'm sure I will come across them eventually - and at least now I know how to pronounce it (which I hear Gavin's colleagues are having some issues with)

The last scheduled slot was the lightning talks. This year they were not scheduled up against any regular talk - good move by the schedulers (I was on the program committee, but didn't help out with the scheduling, so I can take no credit myself). Several very interesting and a couple of fun talks, and some that did both. The award for best lightning talk this year has to go to Josh Tolley and his talk on How to not review a patch (Josh: you get no link since your endpoint blog seems to not support author links?!)

Writing up this reminds me: I have yet to review several of these talks on the pgcon website. If you were there and haven't done so yet - please do it now! Most speakers really appreciate the feedback - I know I certainly do. It's what helps us be better next year! It will also help the program committee pick which talks are most interesting for next year.

I skipped out on the tourism-in-ottawa tour by Dan since I've done that the previous years, and instead took a train up to Montreal with Greg Stark, Dave Page, Selena Deckelmann and Bruce Momjian. Greg gave us a nice tour of that city instead (where he's originally from). And it was certainly thorough - there's this one roundabout that we did at least 3 laps in... Obviously we failed to completely stop talking about PostgreSQL, but at least that wasn't the main focus.

Left Montreal Sunday evening and arrived back in Europe Monday morning, and am now just waiting for the connecting flight to do the last leg back to Stockholm, and back to the regular work.

So, the short version of the pgcon summary:

Talks track : excellent

Hallway track : excellent

Bar track : excellent

Shawarma track : good

$(other) track : excellent

If you didn't go to pgcon this year, this is a good time to start thinking about going next! And don't forget pgday.eu in Paris this November!

pgcon, 1st talk day

We're now up to the third day of pgcon, the first one of the actual conference - the previous ones being dedicated to tutorials. The day started with Selena, me and Dave doing a semi-improvised keynote. Well, it started with Dan saying welcome and going through some details, but he doesn't count... I doubt we actually spread any knowledge with that talk, but at least we got to plug some interesting talks at the conference, and show pictures of elephants.

Missed the start of the Aster talk on Petabyte databases using standard PostgreSQL, but the parts I caught sounded very interesting. I'm especially excited to hear they are planning to contribute a whole set of very interesting features back to core PostgreSQL. This makes a lot of sense since they're building their scaling on standard PostgreSQL and not a heavily modified one like some other players in the area, and it's very nice to see that they are realizing this.

After this talk, it was time for my own talk on PostgreSQL Encryption. I had a hard time deciding the split between pgcrypto and SSL when I made the talk, but I think it came out fairly well. Had a number of very good questions at the end, so clearly some people were interested. Perhaps even Bruce managed to learn something...

After this we had lunch, and I'm now sitting in Greg Smiths talk about benchmarking hardware. This is some very low level stuff compared to what you usually see around database benchmarking, but since this is what sits underneath the database, it's important stuff. And very interesting.

The rest of the day has a lineup of some very nice talks, I think. So there'll be no sitting around in the hallway! And in the evening there is the EnterpriseDB party, of course!

Yesterday had the developer meeting, where a bunch (~20) of the most active developers that are here in Ottawa sat down together for the whole day to discuss topics around the next version of PostgreSQL, and how our development model works. Got some very important discussions started, and actually managed to get agreement on a couple of issues that have previously been going in circles. All in all, a very useful day.