… or, “Making Event Attendance Count”

Late last year, I gave a keynote at paired Finnish conferences MindTrek and OpenMind. While the events were well worth attending, afterwards I spent a few bleak hours thinking about the actual costs of my attendance. If I had left Canada just for these events (which, thankfully, I didn’t) then a naive estimation of costs would have been something like this:

• ~20 000 km of air travel (Vancouver to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Helsinki. Return.)
• ~7 000+ CAD of costs (flights, hotels, taxis, meals, time) (borne by a combination of eZ Systems, the Mozilla Foundation and the …

Like in the past two years, there will be a DotOrg-Pavilion as part of the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008 exhibition floor. We've now concluded the invitation process - the following 15 Open Source projects that support MySQL will be present to showcase their work:

• CMS made simple - a fast and easy way to create a web site and manage its contents.
• DbBlender - a project that implements SQL support in Blender to enable remote repository capabilities.
• Entrance - an easy-to use browser for MySQL databases.
• …

I must be awake for about 24 hours now, things are getting a bit blurry. But I have arrived at our MySQL Staff Meeting here in Orlando safely! My flight with Northwest airlines from Frankfurt via Detroit was uneventful - the plane was pretty empty so I was happy to have two seats for myself! The board entertainment program was neat, I really prefer video on demand over scheduled movie broadcasts (I watched "The Nanny Diaries", which was quite funny, and "The Fantastic Four", which had some nice CG effects).

While standing in the immigration line in Detroit somebody in the line next to us waved to me - it was Tobias "Flupps" Asplund, one of our trainers! Quite a funny coincidence, he just had arrived via Amsterdam. We actually were on the same flight from Detroit …

I am happy to announce that I have been selected to speak at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008 on April 14-17, 2008 in Santa Clara, CA. The topic of my talk will be "Performing MySQL Backups using LVM Snapshots" - and I will of course include a plug for the mylvmbackup tool

From the abstract:

Modern Linux distributions provide a very advanced technology to maintain and administer storage devices, called “Logical Volume Manager” (LVM). Among providing several benefits over using plain hard disk partitions, one of the unique features of LVM is the capability to create snapshots of file systems on the fly. This functionality comes in handy for performing consistent …

While some colleagues have already arrived in Orlando to meet fellow MySQLers, my plane from FRA to MCO (via DTW) does not leave until 10:20am tomorrow. Currently I am staying at my parents' place in Heidelberg, from which I will be picked up by an airport shuttle service early tomorrow morning (5:40am, ugh!).

I am looking forward to meeting with the other members of my team as well as old and new colleagues from the different departments. There seems to be some kind of outdoor team building event taking place on Wednesday afternoon - we have been split up into mixed groups and were asked to bring comfortable clothes and a light sweater or jacket. I hope I am not too jetlagged by the end of the day...

This will be my fourth MySQL staff meeting - when I joined the company in 2002, I was lucky to attend the third staff meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia right during the first week when I started my new job. Back then, we …

This certainly took longer than expected, but here are some pictures that I took during our MySQL Developer Meeting in Heidelberg, Germany last month. Enjoy!

I’ve come in late for Monty’s session - everything seems to be running a bit early - how odd.

Monty’s is covering mistakes in building communities - he’s talking about Dream Box and how they have let their community fragment so deeply. Then he talks about how MySQL has provided a strong central point for the development of the server.

At this point someone asks how much contributed code is in MySQL. Monty says very little in the core server (but mentioning the Windows port as a large and notable exception). He should mention that the non-server contributions are huge, but he gets sidetracked.

He heads back to his slides and start discussion stats from MySQL’s past - how many copies have been distributed (and estimated 100 million+ - about 40k downloads per day.) Lots and lots of books (about 250 in English, 200 in German, 200 in French, 50 in Japanese and 20+ in Spanish. Also in Chinese, Russina, Portuguese, …

After a break, Tommi Mikkonen of the Tampere University of Technology introduces Monty Widenius (who is, as most readers of this blog will know is one of the founders of MySQL AB)

Monty takes the stage wearing a suit - a nice suit - something I don’t recall having seen before.

He starts with an overview of the near past of DBMSs, talking about the state of databases around 1995, covering the state of proprietary and open products around this time.

He then quickly moves to discussing the rise of databases in web apps in the mid-to-late ninties. He’s covering a lot of metaphorical ground pretty quickly, perhaps too quickly for a crowd that may not be familiar with DBMS or web apps. If I had been thinking, I would have sat in the back of the room so that I could see how well-suited the content is the for the audience.

Monty has started discussing how the use of …

In 2002, a short while after I started at MySQL, I saw Lawrence Lessig present at OSCON. The presentation was extraordinarily good and Lessig is a tremendously passionate, genuine and compelling orator.

I immediately revised my presentation style. I stole what ideas and style I could. While I was mostly presenting about MySQL and PHP at the time, the ideas served me well (though the style has at times fit me about as well as a young child fits their parent’s clothes.)

Five years have passed since then, and I have given a hundred or more presentations. Never have I presented as well as Lessig that night, but I still keep trying. In a few days, I am going to have to try a lot harder.
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I am a conference junkie. I love attending them, organizing them, speaking at them, planning to attend them, seeing my friends at conferences, making friends with the nice (but often stressed) people who run conferences and so on. I even like eating the (often bad) food - kvetching about it builds a sense of camaraderie with the other participants.

Given how much time and money I spend on conferences already, it might be hard for you to be able to get more money directly out of me. However, here is one small tip on a way that you might be able to do this.

When you send me email about upcoming events, send me links to useful feed as well. Many of you are technologists who run technology conferences for other technologists. For Zarquon’s sake, use the common pieces of technology that many of us use.

What would such feeds look like? Well, to answer my own rhetorical question …
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