Reason #257 to work at MySQL. You get invited to the company meeting in Orlando, Florida, next January. If you follow a MySQL’er on Dopplr, for instance, you might see that they’re all generally away in Orlando, during the 15-19 January 2008.

Well, the whole company, naturally cannot be there… MySQL has essential services, like support and IT infrastructure that must continue to hum along, while the rest of the company enjoys a few days of sunny Florida.

I don’t exactly know what’s planned, but one can imagine team building exercises, internal team meetings, and quite possibly teams meeting other teams (to increase team interoperability and efficiency). It seemed to have worked well at the Heidelberg DevMeeting, so I presume it’ll scale well for a much larger group. And of course fun - good dinners, great company, and plentiful drinking I’m sure will ensue.

Highly excited I …

One of these years I will finally get a talk accepted for OScon and actually be able to attend. I always hear good things about the conference and it seems like my company almost has its own track this year.

For those of you who are attending, be sure to attend some of the great talks being delivered by my friends and colleagues:

Improving Performance by Profiling PHP Applications
Next-Gen Interaction with Ajax, Comet, and PHP
Advanced Production Troubleshooting
Scalable Internet Architectures …

This weekend, Monty and I got together for a different kind of hacking session.

Instead of developing software, we were working on developing a set of rough principles and rules for running a Free Software/Open Source business. We both have a good amount of experience working with various FLOSS projects (like Mozilla, MySQL, PHP, etc.) and FLOSS companies (like eZ Systems, Mozilla, MySQL, Zend, etc.) and hope that we can put this experience to good use.

For me, this was a tremendous help - I’ve been putting off working on this for Foo Associates for some months now. It is much easier to work on meeting the needs of customers than it is to work on planning for the future.

The notes are still extremely rough, but both Monty and I want to post them so that people can discuss. Also, …

Yesterday morning, I had an initial face-to-face meeting with a prospective client. We met at the Victrola Cafe. He's putting together a pretty neat Web2.0 custom app. My first task for him will be writing a little process that monitors a particular public database and writes changes into S3, to start capturing a historical timeline. There is a great deal of additional AWS, DB, and web client programming work I am qualified to do for him.

Today, I pulled together a software developement contractor contract, rewrote a bit of it to be aware of open source licencing "stuff", and then emailed it off to him, along with my rate and time estimate.

Today’s been interesting. Its labour day here in Melbourne, so I believe a lot of people are enjoying the long weekend. I on the other hand, have been labouring over the long weekend, and we have stuff to show for it. Via the Forge Wiki:

• Google Summer of Code 2007 - we’ve applied, we’ve identified mentors, and we’ve also identified some project ideas. Last week was rather busy sorting all this out. My boss, Kaj explains it a lot better in his post, Global Warming & Google Summer of Code. Students, do apply to come code with us!
  Keep the March 14 - 24, 2007 dates (Cupertino, California time) in your mind students… Thats when the Google SoC opens up. Of course, come March 14 …

The following is what i wrote on “43people.com” about the boss. I thought it was worth keeping in my own archives, since it’s actually a story about my life as it pertains to Mr. Bezos.

Back a few years ago, I was taking some classes down in Edmonds. The one I’m thinking of in particular was on the care and feeding of unix. We were using red hat linux 6.0 or some crufty version that wasn’t so crufty at the time.

Anyway, the prof didn’t require that we buy any books, but he made some suggestions. And he also suggested that we buy them on this new fangled “Internet” thing through a few of his friends down south in Seattle at this place called Amazon.com.

And thus was my introduction to O’Reilly and Associates. I soon thereafter bought a book called “ …

Kathy Sierra’s closing keynote at linux.conf.au 2007 was a rather interesting one. I took away a lot from it, and while I might not be giving a summary of my thoughts here, one of her slides had a quote about a fake book she co-authored, that made me chuckle a little.

“So does this mean Ruby programmers are more emo than, say, Perl programmers?

MySQL people are definitely 5000% more emo than PostgreSQL people.”

Some will recognize that from a comment made in her blog post, Announcing The Emo Programmer book. But I took another parallel to the statement, because in the past few weeks, the MySQL community have been taking the recent Enterprise/Community announcements in a rather unwelcoming way.

MySQL are not getting rid of binaries in the Community release, as …

MySQL MiniConf at linux.conf.au 2007
This implies I’m coming to linux.conf.au 2007 in Sydney next January. What’s more is that during the MiniConfs, we’ve got one for MySQL. Its on January 15th, and we’ve just put out the call for participation/papers. You have about eight (8) days left to submit a paper. So submit your tales of deployment, conference presentations, and I believe we’re even willing to accept “hand’s on” hacking sessions (ala what happened at MySQL Camp). Keep the wiki page handy, and submit goodies to mysql-miniconf[AT]mysql[dot]com.

Interview with Paddy Sreenivasan
Yes, Engineering Lead at Zmanda, they’re big on AMANDA and now …

It was my pleasure to work with Mårten Mickos, CEO of MySQL for about a year during 2005 and 2006. I was astounded by how involved he is with the employees and how well he keeps abreast of the goings-on in the company. He seems to be of the rare set who are not only strong supporters and evangelizers of the company and software, but are also technically familiar with it. With great folks like Mårten, Brian, Arjen, Zack and Ulf, MySQL AB has been and continues to be one of the most important Open Source companies that exists.

Go read the slashdot article here:
…

Some interesting things happened today…

We released a new MySQL server a few days ago, and that consequently means we’ve got a new Connector/PHP available for download. Go get ext/mysqli and ext/mysql against 5.0.26 while its hot.

And while we do support ext/mysql, we’d rather you (and your applications) used ext/mysqli. After all, wouldn’t you like to be able to use the new, much touted features that came post MySQL 4.1, like Views, Stored Procedures, Triggers, Precision Math, and so on?

So to make it a complete no brainer, we released a MySQLi Converter Tool. Its also available via subversion. The tool is branched off Revision 11 (in …