Postgres FM - Events

Episode Date: December 1, 2023

Nikolay and Michael discuss PostgreSQL events — whether in-person or online, large conferences or small meet-ups, as well as some strong opinions based on their experiences attending, speaking, and organising them.  Here are some links to things they mentioned:PGSQL Phriday #014: PostgreSQL Events https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/pgsql-phriday-014-postgresql-events/ PGCon https://www.pgcon.org/ Highload https://highload.rs/ The San Francisco Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup Group https://www.meetup.com/postgresql-1/ Our episode on “Why is Postgres popular?” https://postgres.fm/episodes/why-is-postgres-popular PGConf EU https://pgconf.eu/ Open talks series on Postgres TV https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLH8y1BNPAKjJCuZiDRl0qUEDaKLBpFvZ9 Rails World (including videos!) https://rubyonrails.org/world Upcoming events https://www.postgresql.org/about/events/ ~~~What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!~~~Postgres FM is brought to you by:Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.aiMichael Christofides, founder of pgMustardWith special thanks to:Jessie Draws for the amazing artwork 

Hello, hello, this is PostgresFM. I don't remember episode number. 74. Thank you, Michael. This is Michael, by the way, and my name is Nikolai, as usual. Only once we had a guest, right? Maybe it's time to invite more, but it's a different story. So this is PostgresFM, and we do it since summer 2022, not skipping any weeks and i'm still surprised that we didn't skip any weeks it's good and today this topic was again suggested but from outside we didn't invent it right yeah i i chose or insisted on this topic this week we're gonna go along with the monthly blogging event pg sequel friday pavlo from cyber tech has suggested the topic events or postgres events more specifically not event queue right

no not events no in person conferences online events uh there's quite broad topic and we could go in any direction you want with this. I've got a few things I'd love to talk about and ask you questions about. You've hosted meetups in the past. We've mentioned it briefly on the podcast before. So, yeah, I'd love to get your perspective from an organization point of view as well. But, yeah, speaking. We've both spoken at in-person and online events, both attended and listened to people's talks.

So yeah. Yeah, this is an interesting area, which I have a very opinionated point of view on this topic. And I think for me, it started back to 2006, 2007, actually earlier. So offline events are fun. They are good, but I don't look at them anymore. And this is funny.

Right now we have AWS huge event happening. Many Postgres folks are there, right? Reinvent. Reinvent, yeah. They just announced Limitless Aurora with Postgres support first and MySQL coming later. And people are already joking about limitless bills, right?

I haven't seen that. That's great. See, I have all news not coming there, right? For knowledge, we don't need to go anywhere anymore because internet is delivering knowledge better. And I observe also

hybrid approach when we go to offline event, but you consume knowledge mostly through computer, being at offline event. Offline event is good to meet people, right? But I still think there should be some new type of event invented to support human meetings, just for collaboration and so on so not in the form of

sharing knowledge like one guy on stage with slide deck because i think like it's my opinion but let's start from from the past and maybe by the end of this podcast some people will understand me better i know not everyone will agree with me. And I also enjoy meeting with people in person. But for knowledge, it's not efficient. This is my position anymore. And meetups are kind of dead almost, unfortunately. There are some meetups... Well, golden era of meetups is behind us, unfortunately. When 200 you know, like 200 people came and company hosting says, we don't have coffee break supply anymore. Let's close registration.

I say, forget about coffee. Let's bring more people. They're coming, coming because of Postgres popularity. You know, it happened many years ago. So where to start? Well, you mentioned 06, 07 as a specific point for you. What was happening then? It was actually the first event. The first serious event for me was when I was

speaking. It was about databases, but not about Postgres. And I was presenting some, I don't remember, maybe my master thesis materials in Kyiv, Ukraine, actually. Oh, wow. It was some scientific conference, actually. It was a kind of, not a scientific, academic conference. Yeah, it was some kind of fun to come there to speak. It was very long ago, 2005, maybe 2004 even. So, yeah. Then 2007 was turning point for Russia and that part of world when somehow a few things started to happen. First of all, I chose Postgres in 2006. And then I participated

a little bit in XML development and visited PGCon in 2007. And in the same year, 2007, we started, not we, one guy actually started High Load Conference in Russia. His name was Oleg. I also, Oleg Bunin and another Oleg Bartonov, I also met him around that time because Oleg Bartonov is, you know, and Taylor Seagaev and then Alexander Korotkov. These are big Russian names, maybe after Vadim Mihaev, who was before them working on Wall. These guys worked on full text search, gene indexes, gist indexes, a lot of such stuff related to performance and how we retrieve data faster. And so it was happening very fast in 2007. I also had my first startup and I used Postgres a lot.

And then this conference series started high load. And since I just visited PGCon, I immediately invited Bruce Momjin. For anybody that doesn't know, PGCon is or was hosted in Canada yearly and is very Postgres developer-centric, I believe. Yes. So for people working on the Postgres internals itself, it's probably the best conference each year for them, would you say? It's not kind of best, but it was the first in 2006.

So I visited the second one in 2007 in Ottawa. And this year I visited the last one. So no more PidgeyCon, unfortunately. But isn't it being taken over by new people now? Yeah. Dan, who was organizer of PidgeyCon, said that the successor of it will be in Vancouver, I guess, next year, and a different set of people will be organizing it.

And the name will be changed to Pidgecon something, I don't remember. But anyway, my decision right now, I're jumping between past and current and slightly future. For me, I said no more offline events for a couple of years. I don't see a point. Last three events were terrible in terms of efficiency for me. And, well, I'm not complaining. I just, this is my position. I prefer sharing knowledge online right now and consuming and learning online. I still miss meeting some people, but I can organize it separately.

So this is my vision. So back to 2007, we started, again, not we. I just was like a member of committee from the beginning, responsible for database topic. And I invited Bruce Mongeon right away because I just met him in Ottawa. So he visited Moscow, and since then he visited many, many times High Load. And at the same time, one guy and I, we were working on our startup together. We started Meetup in also 2007, 2008, Moscow Russian user group.

I later renamed it from PostgysRussia to RuPosgys when I realized that half of people speaking Russian are outside Russia. So it became RuPosgys. And this story continued for me with some ups and downs till 2022, February 24 when the war started like the war started earlier in 2014 but a new phase invasion started and we had disagreement

internally because my position always was you cannot split completely politics from regular work, and we need to be careful. The morning organizer and the absolute majority of program committee were against me, and we didn't agree.

They started to delete my messages internally. Sorry to hear that, yeah. And I exited the program committee a few days after the war started. But anyway, the experience I had running these meetups offline, again, after a couple of hundred people, it's huge. It was

insane, like 2015, maybe 2016, when post-gift popularity started to grow significantly. So were these one one day events were they evening events like meetup types it never was more than three hours and sometimes i combine a couple of topics three topics the actually let's let's cover a few like in 2008 we had very interesting event it was recorded again in in Moscow. And after that, I was so exhausted because I thought I'm a very bad organizer and I don't understand technical details and I cannot do it anymore. said oh this is this this was real amazing event what i did i invited three guys from postgres community and three guys from my sequel community including peter peter zeitz of yeah and we and we

had kind of battle postgres versus my sequel and that was fun yeah but i was exhausted after that i i took break like couple of years not no, and then only relaunched it. Not a couple, many years of break. Then I watched how George Berkus is running meetups in San Francisco, and I realized that it can be kind of interesting again. And then I returned to Moscow for a few months. Then I started visiting. It was due to work and life reasons. It was already after an invasion of Crimea, but complicated things. But I relaunched meetups there and immediately

got huge attention after many years. Before 2014-15, Postgres was like kind of an outsider. It was like, you need to prove why you choose it, because it's complicated, it's hard to maintain and so on. It's still hard to maintain, that's why RDS and others have their value delivering, maintenance headache is solved. But in 2014-15, probably because not only because of JSON, I think also because of RDS popularity started to grow. Yes, yes. And I felt like, you know, like this, I need to choose some, you know, how to organize meetup once again. Well, I have some connections. I just asked some people who work at big companies, can you host? They are ready to host because, you know, they want to compete and show how good offices are,

you know, because for them it's advertising for HR purposes. Anybody hiring is a really good way of sharing. Right. Yeah. Yes, exactly. And you can just use it if you want to organize. Currently the situation is different because of COVID and remote-focused companies. Yeah. Yes, exactly. And you can just use it if you want to organize. Currently, situation is different because of COVID and remote-focused companies. This is another reason

why my problem meetups are declining. We can discuss it a little bit later. So what happened, I decided, okay, it will be Yandex. And I said, okay, how many people they say, okay, like, maximum 80 people, maybe I said, Okay. And then they quickly asked me to close registration because out of you know, coffee cups or something like I said, coffee, it's not needed. Like we can do without coffee, you know. And then they asked a question I cannot forget. They said, this is your event, of course, but can we grab like 10 minutes and also present something that will be about Postgres?

I said, well, of course, what will it be? And they said, this is how we migrated the Yandex.Mail from Oracle to Postgres. I started to feel like, wow, this should be not 10 minutes only. And then Vladimir Borodin, who hired Andrey Borodin later, which is interesting, just coincidence, last name's the same.

And then they presented it at PgCon later. It was a huge migration from Oracle to Postgres and the reasons were interesting, solutions were interesting, like super interesting topic. So I found the gem right away. Just trying to come to big company and use their facilities to host meetup. And then I remember in first row, I saw new faces.

And then these new faces became kind of almost like friends for me in following years. Because these guys worked at large companies, large e-commerce companies and so on. And all of them used Postgres. I was like, wow, Postgres is different now. This return was super successful. So I have good memories. But unfortunately, of course,

like this political situation and so on, like I had this, like we divided right now. And some people work at companies i don't appreciate not only appreciate i consider like kind of enemies already because if a company has some any any connections with military russia this is enemy for me yeah i think your cat agrees yes unfortunately it's sad but like anyway this this was a great experience. We had at some point a couple of hundred people. And obviously language specific ones that include some Postgres talks. But we also have these PG days that tend to be one day events, full day, not just three hours, kind of like six, seven, eight hours full of talks as well. So maybe even six, seven, eight talks. And it's London, right?

Like this is a hub for the UK and possible to get to from quite a lot of other places in Europe quite easily. And I think we had fewer than 100 attendees. It was a good turnout, but 200 people for a three-hour event is a serious turnout. It also depends on channels you use to attract people. But I honestly think the golden era was when post-Guest population started to grow, like 15, 16, 17, 18, these years. Now it's declining and people don't see big value coming to offline events because, you know, the problem with knowledge consumption, like learning at offline event, of course, it's good you can ask your question.

Definitely. But honestly, you can ask a question in follow-up under YouTube right now and we will try to answer as well, but in asynchronous format. But the problem is, if you can probably use 1.5 speed and still understand me, right? This is efficiency, right? And also tickets cost a lot, usually. If it's the same town, okay, it's good. That's a good point. It wasn't free as well. So I'm guessing your meetup was free for attendees? Always free. That's a big difference. I would say though, I think there are these, I think you're onto something with the differences. And I would say that meeting people and connections that you make are really interesting. It doesn't always happen in person events, but I've noticed

when you're involved in some capacity like as a speaker i found people approached me and it was i had much better level of conversation with people when i was a speaker than attendee to attendee type conversations like it's not always difficult to have good conversations but yeah i found as a speaker it definitely definitely helped. Some online events which happen synchronously above the recording and then the ability to asynchronously re-watch or re-watch what you missed. Some events try to have formats like moving the speaker and people who are interested to a separate room

or virtual room. And then you can spend time asking questions and so on. Actually, honestly, with online events, it's also sometimes good, sometimes bad. Like I had, for example, a couple of hours event when more than 500 people watched me. Wow. The key here is that Postgres community, the core Postgres community is quite small. And if you want more people, you need to reach backend developers,

like analyst people and others, like maybe even frontend developers and so on. In this case, it can be huge. But if you're just targeting the same people all the time, it won't grow fast, I think. But the quality of questions will be also different in this case, right? Well, there are big postgres only events um like the the one in europe i went to the one last year we both that's the one time we've met in person actually right all right that was over 600 people

at one event but it was three or four simultaneous tracks so it wasn't 600 people watching every talk or watching one talk it was split across multiple tracks and then the so it was it was jam-packed in fact i was on the program committee for that which was a lot of work in fact we can cover that a little bit i think it might be interesting to people how those work but my point for that was it was stacked each it was multiple days three or four days of three or four tracks of talks with with breaks, with that coffee breaks and lunch breaks. But no kind of like nothing else, no other structure around meeting people. And then I've heard this phrase. Is it the hallway track? People call it. So skipping the odd talk. Sometimes it's good to skip just for a break and maybe if you if you run a

business maybe check your emails or if you're still working uh if you're on call that kind of thing just just check in or just go for a walk but the alternative is hang around and chat to other people that are skipping a talk or right if you know the area in general i feel in general probably even if you attend offline, what I think all speakers and conference organizers, event organizers should do is collect. Collecting slide decks

in advance doesn't work because a lot of people, including myself, prepare them until last minute. But there should be a way to distribute slide deck, the finalized version, right away online. Like when talk is started, slide deck is ready for sure. So this version should be distributed.

It's a simple thing, but event organizers fail here often. They try to tell me, oh, you need to send me slide deck two weeks in advance. I have many times. I never never did and they cannot do it anything anything with with it like it's not possible because there is no slide deck yet but in the last minute they should collect and distribute because others who probably attending another track or they're just working as you said right when i attend the events I usually give my talk and I never attended anything, honestly. But it's just not efficient. I cannot sit one hour and listen to this thing of 80% I understand just from slides.

It's not efficient. I want to look at slides quickly and then probably talk to this guy directly. Well, sometimes it works. Sometimes it's interesting. But not often at all. Well, I mean, my situation is probably different because at the same time I

found myself attending person-to-person rehearsals or Postgres TV Open Talk series and there I enjoy. I can spend one hour diving deep and so on but regular talks very often i just see like this i know this i know this i know and it's like

i would i would just rather look at slides and and catch you later in in the hall right yeah i don't think you're discussing i think you're atypical here because you probably know the contents like it most good talks start with like some introductory stuff for people that don't know the topic well that's almost never going to be useful for you but it's really useful for other people and i personally probably have a higher tolerance for watching these talks live partly because i know less and partly because I think there's this, every now and again, there's a throwaway comment that the speaker probably didn't even plan to say, but just happened to come to their mind during the talk. That's not in the slides. That is the

most interesting thing to me about that talk. And sometimes 55 minutes of a talk were not useful, but the five minutes that were, was so helpful to me that it was worth it. I agree here. If a speaker says you can interrupt me anytime, I usually also do it. This is good. Why does that not surprise me? Probably

we can just cover some additional deep, narrow topic during the talk. It can be interesting. I agree here. But anyway, I think flexibility should be good here. People who want to watch it fully in person, okay.

People who want to watch it later, because sometimes too... Highload had more than 3,000 attendees and 10 tracks in parallel. Almost always I saw some interesting materials in parallel. Like I cannot attend them both. I can walk between them. But they also compiled everything and later, a couple of months later, you can watch everything. That's great.

They also published books. I remember reading these books from time to time. Yeah, just you just decode it like today it's easy. We have a pipeline for our subtitles. Alex Ferrari- But talk so the same as like, it's not the same as writing a book. It wouldn't be very good. Sanyam Bhutani. There are many, many goals why you want to attend the talk many goals and, and if it's pure knowledge, if you want to understand some other people's experience and some just knowledge, you know, like you want to understand some method how to do something

or complexities, you probably don't need it now, but you might need it later, like in half a year, for example. In this case, having books transcoded, it's easy again. With AI, it's super easy. We have it, right? In this case, this builds value. This conference delivers, right? And I remember these books were helpful. I was reading some MySQL talks, which I didn't attend because

I was not interested. But now I'm interested in this topic and post this, and I see MySQL has something. And I remember there are talks about it and I just read these materials with slides and text and you understand. Then you can watch recording if you want

or you can combine. There are many ways. And also some people are okay with listening. Some people need to see it. There are different people. Some people want to redo. Oh, I didn't understand. I want to rewind. What I'm trying to say offline works for some online works also for like some, and if there is a good material and good speaker today, we can produce many results just from one

recording. I mean, one time you explain something and then we have all possible variations of this knowledge and we can help people consume it asynchronously or synchronously and in any way, like text, video, audio, right? I think you're right about different people having ideal methods of learning, but I think there's also a point here about accessibility and i mean i don't mean it in the kind of technical sense i mean it almost from a like being able to afford to do things and also being able to like traveling to events is it can

be expensive staying can be expensive tickets can be expensive and in the at least in my experience in the postgres world unlike some of the bigger language conferences, we don't tend to pay. I don't think I've seen many events, if any, that pay speakers or pay for travel or pay for a conversation. Hello always do that. That's great. Not pay, but reimburse the travel costs and hotel costs

just to make it simple simple to bring better speakers yeah but not just better but also just a wider well i guess that that does imply better doesn't if you're if you're recruiting from a wider pool of people that you'll improve yeah also i remember that then i mean pgcon paid me in 2007 to go through Toronto to Ottawa. And it was amazing that I was very young and, of course, lack of money, obviously. And this helped me. I always remember this. I do apologize.

I think PGCon is the exception or was the exception. Right, right, right. PGCon did it. And that's great. I saw the idea this year again. Actually, I could use that help. I just didn't use it

because already I can cover myself. Nice. I don't need it. But it was cool to see it was still happening. And I think it's the right thing to do to help people come from various parts of the world.

Yeah. And with the sponsorship, I think there do to help people come from various parts of the world. Yeah. And, and with the sponsor, I think there is enough money in spot. Well, I haven't tried running an event. I do realize it's really difficult to break even. I think there's a money wise.

It is difficult, but we can, it's not difficult. It's not, it's okay. It's a lot of work, but if you do it with passion, it's not super difficult.

And there are many companies who are good sponsors, right? For example, I don't know, like big events, like some I participated in, 3,000 people and so on, had budgets like more than $1 million per one event. And there are many companies who are attracted. If you go with like banks, like e-commerce, they come and you just need to organize a lot. And this is like 24-7 work for a couple of weeks

before a conference starts. And you won't be able to sleep if you need a huge event. But it's possible. Most of our events are still run by very hard-working volunteers,

people that aren't getting paid to do that work. But why we discuss this? Once they started accepting money from companies, they should stop saying volunteers. They have money. Just charge them more and that's it and deliver better quality.

Just do it or like, I don't know. For example, you know, like, okay, here we discuss the controversial topic which I have very strong opinion on. If you have sponsors, you must provide recording, at least for people who paid, right? Otherwise, for speakers, it's not fair. They come, they see, okay, you brought like 20 or 50 people,

but work is so huge, it's better to go to youtube and then then later people who are interested will be able to listen and see your material right so i don't know of course conference in person delivers better connection i had very good follow-ups very good like they said we attended your talk blah blah blah super but i don't understand why I need to spend huge effort preparing slides. And this happened with three last conferences, actually. So you spend a lot of effort. Probably you pay for your tickets and hotel to come. How do you do it as a speaker?

I mean, well, usually it's so and we as we discussed the exclusions but from pos this community normal is i don't know i i like okay this picture 2007 was exclusion high load always paid nobody else paid usually i. I always come just because I'm interested in presenting, you know. And not anymore. I'm not coming anymore. And I can tell everyone. Last year, to East Coast, but I decided to present online only. And I confirmed I'm not doing offline events anymore. So what I'm trying to say, very simple idea. You do a lot of effort. You have a break in your work.

Of course, if your employer pays, this is a different story, right? Basically, employer bribes you here. So like you have a vacation, you visit. This is a different story, right? Yeah. Basically, employer bribes you here. So, like, you have a vacation, you visit. This is super fun, cool. But if we speak purely about professional efficiency, like work efficiency and so on, like effort versus result, I don't understand any reason why this talk cannot be recorded because you did a lot of effort and you want the result to be recorded too. It's super annoying when you spend a lot of effort.

You came to some conference. You found even 50 people. Cool. But you understand if it was recorded, maybe a few hundred more from different parts of the world would watch it and tell you something interesting, for example, or follow up. Or you would find more thinking minds, right? This is why you're presenting usually. Several of my first... So I was late for the post-credits.

Recording is super expensive. That's the normal reason, yeah. I only have rude words here. Can I move us? I think you've got a point, but also it's difficult. All we can do is ask and see what people do. If they can afford to get a – some conferences are now saying that these videos are sponsored by this sponsor,

so the sponsor paid the money for the recording so that's a way of these conferences forgot that this is open source and we should go low-key like simple approach we all have like ipads or something and we can record on laptop we we don't need like high high expensive production yes well it will be high quality. Expensive production, yes. Well, it will be high quality. The microphones are good already enough, or you can buy $100 microphone. It's not expensive. $100 or $200. So Rode, they're like,

how it's called? Lavalier? I don't remember. Attach them. It's wireless. Super cheap. I mean, $200. What is it? And then you don't need to record faces at all. All you need is just sound and slides synchronized. Yeah, good point.

It can be 100% automated. And then one guy, one student, you can pay this guy like 300 bucks to publish these 20 talks or how many you have. That's it. I honestly, like, for me, it's so deep problem. I want to move us on, but partly to advertise something you've been doing, which is a Postgres Open Talk series on YouTube. So if any speakers out there, I know reaching out to

them is quite a lot of work, but if any speakers out there have given a talk that they wish was recorded, or was it an event that wasn't able to record for some reason, you'll have them onto the YouTube channel to present and ask a couple of questions. And I think that's a really great service. So if anybody wants to reach out, that would be awesome. We can add to that series. Yes, thank you.

Indeed, I did it last in this year a little bit. I don't know, like maybe 10 or 15 talks. But I found like I don't have capacity for inviting people. But if someone is interested and this is a very interesting material, definitely I will be happy to do it. Because for me, it's actually zero overhead except one hour or how many times do we need to do it online? Nothing like no special production at all and now we have beautiful workflow or how's it called pipelines that delivers very good quality subtitles right we have it and this like super cheap and super fast and the quality is super good i i enjoy it last

time i said in previous episode i I said begin except blocks because I spent too much time with Python recently. And this pipeline, because it's based on Whisper and GPT-4 Turbo models, APIs from OpenAI, it corrected me. And in subtitles, you have begin exception as it should be. So it's a good example. And but it's very gentle correcting. So with most corrections, usually when you write a book, for example, and the character starts to bring some stupid corrections, you know, like you stop it, don't do it here, it's very gentle and just uses the list of terms we've built and extend from time to time.

And optionally, we can have an article or blog post out of that talk. Also, it would require some additional effort, but I think it makes sense. If it's an interesting material, we can redo the talk if it was not recorded at some conference. And then we can also have a blog post out of it with very low effort. If people want, right? Yeah, if wanted. Yeah. If anyone listening to this is also an event organizer, I also offer

to cooperate here. I can share. It's not like rocket science it's just ai right oh and we can i mean we can we can if you have some recordings already we can ask authors if they are okay with it by the way with my talks uh i usually gave in russian in the past there's a guy who just enjoyed doing it and just publishing these posts, transforming recording from YouTube to a good blog post which was discussed on some platform. He was just enjoying, like, he was trying to find good materials and then publishing a good article. It's like translation, but not from English to some language,

but it's translation from video video audio to text because many people are better consuming texts so we can do it if you have a lot of video recordings of recent events we can transcode them and create blog posts out of it or just get better subtitles

right like the subtitles alone are great. Subtitles can be approved or I still think if you had a good event The subtitles, right? Like the subtitles alone are great. Subtitles can be approved. Or I still think if you had a good event, you have a good opportunity to reach out to wider audience if you convert it to text. True. It's text with pictures from slide deck. Sure. Illustrations.

So step by step. And it's quite easy to read. I also enjoy reading such like transcoded talks. Maybe sometimes better than watching full video because. Well, much more skimmable. Yeah. Skim through is keyword here. Yeah.

The thing I wanted to share about the, like for anybody out there considering submitting talks to conferences, there were a couple of things that surprised me being on a selection committee one was that experienced speakers often submit multiple talks to the same uh multiple abstracts to the same event that shocked me it never occurred to me to submit multiple i thought i've got this one idea for a talk i'm going to submit that but the problem is as a select selection committee is you don't really want two talks of a similar topic at the same event. So you happen to submit a talk to the same event as maybe the world expert on that specific topic. Yeah, fun story related to this. I also usually submit multiple because I know that this increases conversion. You submit, you want something to be selected, and if it's a narrow topic, maybe the problem committee doesn't find it interesting for the audience of this conference.

So you submit multiple because you have materials or pre-materials. Maybe you already tried some of them some meetups for example and maybe you have a new version of old talk with better details like recently with janga con which i presented online it was my seamless sql optimization tutorial like three three hour tutorial like insane but it was a version three 3 already of this talk. And they selected it, although I submitted, I think, five materials, as I usually do. Yeah. It's just experienced speakers

usually have a lot of materials and they can do it. Or Bruce Momjohn usually submitted, you know how? He usually says, check my website, brucemomjohn.us slash, I don't know, talks. And there are updated talks, there are new talks,

like, you just select what you want. This is what most experienced people do. But let me tell you a short, funny story. During COVID, I actually decided

to return to BGK like, 2019, 20. But I wanted to visit Ottawa once again. And I did it this year, but previous years,

due to COVID, it was fully online, unfortunately. So I was selected in 2020. And then they selected both my tutorial and some talk. And then I remember during the online session, Dan administered everything. He was managing a lot of computers.

And then I remember I connected to my second computers. And then I remember I connect to my second talk and then says, oh, out of recording, he says, oh, you again? Like I said, yes, I will. Two talks were selected.

He said, it should not happen. We have a rule to select only one. We need to fix SQL, which guarantees maybe a wrong group buy. You need to fix SQL, which guarantees maybe a wrong group by, you know. Constraint. Lack of constraint, I guess. Like in the table.

I guess I hacked it and it should not be so. Probably a mistake by the committee, but that's a good point. No, no, no, no. He mentioned that technically it shouldn't be possible because talks are obviously stored in postgres and when they select they try and they select uh like trying to have only one talk to speaker so i guess it's a buckle with sql and it

should be fixed that's it but not anymore it's no more this event unfortunately well yes so on but i was you were talking about kind of from an experienced speaker perspective but i'm talking about new speakers people that haven't don't have experience doing this try and come up with a second one no no so as a speaker as a new speaker and i would encourage people to try it out because i think it can seriously improve your like the number of connections you make at an event or it definitely helped my confidence talking to people at events for some reason that I did actually also want to make an offer to anybody that hasn't ever spoken at a Postgres event before I know it can be daunting so if you and practice is really helpful

if you want to practice in private I I'm happy to be a sounding board. So do message me about that. I'm happy to do that. I think, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I also see that selection of talks just based on abstract is a very poor quality event organization. It should be done with, I think it should be done like almost always with pre-vetting talks, just because it's mutually helpful. Of course,

time consuming, but it's mutually helpful for both sides. So speaker has a rehearsal, feedback, can improve and program committee understands better and have aligned content because like yeah usually bigger bigger events do this like why are you skeptical i see your skeptical face i'm pulling a face for anybody listening well my experience with the the big europe europe event we had hundreds of submissions which but what which i know i was encouraging you to submit multiple but five or six is too potentially too many if i'm just talking about two or three and you get hundreds of submissions and to to vet to vet maybe you need a two-phase process one is on no no it should be four or five phase process should be five it should be but of course the the process here like it

requires development it requires like experience and ideas and maybe this is for bigger events for meetups of course like like a couple of talks let's go and you just decide but if it's big if okay 500 submissions so what like you see which won't go for sure just remove them it will be already 200 right and so on and so on and then you have short list short list probably is 100 but depending on how many slots you have and then you need of course you need several for some people you know the accent speakers right i don't know like peter zeisof like you don't need to vet him at all it's very fine so automatic fast, we call it fast track. That's it.

So automatically accepted, you just need to choose the topic because always Peter Zaitsev is submitting five talks, always. Maybe more. But for people you see first time or you have doubts, sometimes people have doubts. Also funny story, I was was voting as program committee member one guy and then I asked questions, simple questions

and in the evening of the conference the guy says I won't do it these questions are killing me I don't understand this topic well enough but I didn't agree with this guy I said he's good enough to present

still. Like, okay, I asked some important questions, but people can ask them as well, right? It's for preparation and so on. It's not just to say failed, and they said, no, no, we still want you. So I needed to spend time on the evening before

event to convince him to present. I'm like, please, you're still good. So we had another call, and I just said, you're good. I needed to refill his energy and level of confidence, because I actually destroyed it.

It's also, it requires experience from program committee members not to be over, not to attack. I'm sitting like I'm an expert. I'm going to like for self-satisfactory you're saying so hard questions just but this is not right. The goal is not to praise yourself, right? You need to help

to improve the quality of material and like maybe to give some idea what kind of questions people may ask. Sometimes you say, our audience is, for example, usually very practical oriented. You're from academia, let's try to connect

better, right? And you start asking questions and shift slightly, focus here. There are many nuances here, but the idea is sometimes if you're too offensive, it can be harmful. And this is, I think, that story, I was not super harmful, it was just this speaker particularly was quite fragile, right? In the early days when I was in the program committee,

for sure I was harmful sometimes. I know it. But I fixed it myself. So, yeah, sometimes you need to put additional energy to fix it. But if we don't have this process, we're blind. We don't know it.

It's like, maybe it will work, maybe not. And people don't have time to prepare better. They're alone. People always appreciated this kind of process we had. Always. They said, thank you. Sometimes it was in person, by the way. Like rehearsals in person.

If it's the same city, some people say, I'm going to ask this. You don't need to rehearse the whole talk. You just say, I'm going to ask this. You don't need to rehearse the whole talk. You just say, I'm going to cover this, that, and this sequence. And you have good feedback from people who are program committee.

Usually program committee is organized from like people who are CTOs or something like from big companies that have a lot of experience. So their feedback can be very helpful.

Not always, but sometimes, right right but you at least understand what to expect and improve and so on so i think both conferences should follow this process they don't many of them they're just lazy good enough you know we don't record we don't do rehearsals we don't have money for that or we don't have time for that okay or it's different people right like i was on the talk selection committee but i had no other like i wasn't paid for it and it was like it was it was free either for program committee never i was paid oh maybe we discussed it but no that's a problem right if

you're already looking through hundreds of abstracts the idea of also looking at dozens of talks and giving constructive feedback on early versions of those is just so much work for unpaid people to do i think it's a lot to expect the problem isn't we shouldn't do that it's that we should work out a way to fund it and do it but on the flip side i've been at very few bad talk like what's the what's the worst that happens if we give it give a chance to people super boring talk yeah that's the what's the worst happens if we give it give a chance to people super talk yeah that's the worst audience knows material much better than the speaker it happens if you like a fellow not often how often quite often if you and always when it happened it was a mistake from

program committee they didn't pay attention to it like i had it. And I usually visited some talks for control level. For high load, I just visited and then I provided feedback. Like, this is super boring. How come we selected it in the first place? It's super boring. And we improved over years and established a very good process. And other events adopted a similar approach. I know it for like 100%,

I know like some Java events adopted and so on. And like they learned from us and also developed it further. We learned from them. Like it was a mutual process. And it lasted like between 2007 to 2022, kind of like 15 years right it was super fun and I think it's a good

experience but again more I think like it's bottom line from my side it's a lot of effort if you want very good quality event and I think offline events must be with online component at least asynchronously with recordings and

it's also by the, additional ads for the conference because if you distribute materials with some delay and people consume it even for free, they know this conference exists and it delivers good materials. The next time, probably they will convince their employer to pay for a trip in person. So this builds value over time and brand and so on. I agree. I think free is great, but even

if you can't afford to do it for free and it needs to be some small fee, I think there's also a potential thing to be done there. I think people are willing to pay for these things. In my opinion, many more interesting things are happening online these days, but okay. I might be

returning to offline events in a couple of years i think there's something to be said for local events i like going to any that are local to me in the uk or i'm planning to go to one in paris that i can get the train to quite easily do you think that's quite nice to meet people in the area that are also working on similar things the more international ones i think are interesting and the huge ones i find quite daunting but i think there are some examples that we can learn from like i think the rails world recent conference was organized by professionals that were set up and funded by companies that use rails specifically to do things like improve the documentation and hold a conference and do you think and yeah and they super helpful people that went to that conference i don't

actually know that it was made available online i don't think it was but please correct me if i'm wrong there but people that went to that conference had such a great time and were telling stories about in podcasts i listened to about like they were raving about how well organized it was, how many fun things were put on. It can be done even for open, like rails is open source. There's no reason you can't have paid people doing professional job in an open source world. If it's a big enough community, maybe that's where we suffer a little bit. Yeah. Well, yeah, I agree.

So yeah. Anyway, multimodal approach is good like a multi-channel approach is good so i i agree there are big events i just maybe happened to have some special experience yeah thanks so much for sharing it yeah sure so it took so long no No, it's okay. Yeah. Anyway, good luck for everyone who is attending. To speakers, if it's not recorded, we can redo, definitely. I just stopped inviting, but it doesn't mean... Just because I stopped inviting doesn't mean we stopped fully. And now we also have pipeline to build blog posts easily from that.

Great. I know blog posting takes from that. Great. I know blog posting takes a lot of time. So this is the way you spend one hour redoing your talk without preparation. And then you have a blog post out of it. You fix some issues, if any, and we post it anywhere. Although I have noticed a slight trend towards some slightly shorter blog posts.

I think some people are getting back into blogging a little bit more and it's okay to write short blog posts. In fact, this podcast is an entry into a blogging event that is encouraging more people to write blog posts, no matter how short or long they are or how much work they are. I would encourage getting into it. Just be careful with ShadrPT for it, right? Please don't, yeah.

Why not? I have strong opinions there. Okay. Well, if you use ChatGPT, we'll do that. But please, if you use ChatGPT, verify things that you're saying in it. Not each word, but each token. A token is a part of what you need to verify it very carefully, yes. And please verify it before you ask others to check your blog post.

I've been burnt by that and it's particularly painful verifying it for someone else. So yeah, that would be my advice to people using chat GPT. If you want to people to keep reviewing your blog posts, make sense. All right. Thanks so much,

Nikolai catch you next week. And thanks everyone for listening. Bye.