Some random thoughts, notes, etc. from the MySQL Conference & Expo 2007
Here are some random thoughts, notes, observations, etc.
Jay Pipes – he made the conference possible
- Friendster uses Bugzilla internally. Yes they’re still alive, even though MySpace and so forth are around and kicking. Had to Google them (I wanted to find their old talk about their storage engine), and found MySQL Customers – Friendster, instead. From 2005, Dathan’s (now at Flickr) presentation. Never did find the storage engine stuff, beyond random bits in the press.
- Probably the best blog post that hit Planet MySQL, as opposed to the session summaries and so on, comes from Alexy Kovyrin. I quote: “P.S. Just remembered – I saw some women-DBAs today! Really smart girls! I never thought that pretty girl can become such great IT prefessional and now I know – I was really wrong.” Maybe we’ll have the MySQL-Women group, following on the LinuxChix.
- While Adam Donnison from the web team at MySQL gave his talk, I noticed Planet MySQL go down. Looks like the rest of the folk in his talk did too, and Jan Lehnardt says it best in Oh Irony!
- DorsalSource. Congratulations Jeremy Cole, and Solid. I am highly impressed with all the available binaries, from a trusted source. We’ve got the RHEL vs. Fedora vs. CentOS split now :-) (sure, building MySQL isn’t rocket science, as opposed to rebuilding an entire distribution, but consider DorsalSource+patches to be like the kbs-CentOS-Extras repository)
- Microsoft is also wanting to sleep with MySQL, these days. Must be a promiscious world we’re living in (they probably got jealous with IBM/DB2 already being in bed with MySQL). Read The Beautiful Game, and of course MySQL on Windows: A Beautiful Game. I expect this isn’t one off (Port25, Microsoft’s open source effort, has had a lot of open source database articles in recent times).
Some of my photos from the MySQL Conference & Expo – 26 April, 27 April. I wish I had more time & energy (& inspiration) to take more photos. Lenz Grimmer took some of the photos at dinner, as he was taken away by the 50/f1.4 lens and no usage of the magic flash (in fact, I didn’t even bring my external flash unit for the trip).
Mr. Eventum – at the hotel, while we all wound down
Dinner with some of the community members was fun, as always. Next year, more community members should stick around and we should all eat, meet and greet. The Fish Market has got good seafood (save for their lobster, which comes from… Australia. Not something I’d want!)
I was afraid, I thought he’d eat the power squid!
Hrm…I’m certainly not opposed to a MySQL-Women group, but the question is why do we need it? If we need it, it’s because people have thoughts like “I never thought a pretty girl could be smart too!”
That’s like saying “I never thought a cute guy could be a good IT professional!” Although maybe I’m blessed, because I’m just so naturally beautiful. Maybe other women have to spend all their free time primping and getting “beauty sleep”, and I just happen to luck out so I have free time to spend on learning and using MySQL.
Or maybe looks and skill are not inversely proportional, regardless of gender.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s great that people are overcoming their stereotypes. But I’m not an activist for women in the IT profession. I’m in the IT profession, I like to think I’m good, and hey, I happen to be born a woman. It’s not like I overcame a great obstacle or whatever. I’ve worked with one guy who was a chauvenist, but that’s about it.
Then again, how many other people say “I’m not going to wear that, it’s too pretty for a job interview” and make sure to wear their glasses, because glasses = nerdier = the perception of smarter? I do this, although I likely don’t need to any more…..
[…] So, this is me: Special thanx to Colin Charles for taking the picture and linking to it from his blog. […]