Colin Charles Agenda

I have two talks in the coming few weeks, that I’m still madly writing. I’ve come to the realisation that writing talks, really does take a lot of time (when you have a deadline). Especially, if you’re doing it my style – everytime I write a slide, and find something missing in the Wiki, I go ahead and fix it. So its not actually talk writing I’m doing, but expansion of our online documentation, and keeping it in check. That takes time.

• Enhancing Competitiveness Through Technology – I’m giving this talk at the Malaysian Employers Federation (MEF) Annual Conference 2007. Their conference is themed around “Enhancing Competitiveness Through Technology & Law Reforms — The Next 50 Years” and is on the 19-20 November 2007, at the KL Convention Centre. My talk is on the 20th, as I’ll be on a plane on the 19th. This is targeted at CEO/manager level, so is lighter on tech-related content, but more concepts. Come see me in a suit :)
• Paying It Forward: Harnessing the MySQL Contributory Resources – I’m giving this talk at foss.in, it will have a localised title, with regards to the much hyped architecture of participation. MySQL has done some amazing things to “open up” for external contributions, and clearly, we continue to do so, and we must celebrate it, obviously. And get more contributors. I also submitted this talk for the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008, because I think a lot of folk attending will want to know the many ways to contribute to MySQL. We’ve done some great things, and we need to pimp it more. Targeted at the contributor, with some pretty diagrams and patches, yanked off the internals list.

The slide deck and speaker notes will be online, in due time. Part of yet another cool project I’m working on, in where we enable others to give MySQL-related talks.

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 am, to be heading to this event. As will be quite a number of employees, who’ve never been to such an event before! Remember, being a distributed company, in over 25 countries, makes an event in where everyone gathers in one place for a few days, truly memorable, and really important to keep the creative juices flowing. The productivity spike around the DevMeeting clearly prove that some interaction is much better than IRC+emails+voice communication only.

Technorati Tags: mysql, logos, company meeting, florida

I’m noticing some trends of late, as I go through the proposals for the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008.

Rails: has it lost its steam? I’d like to see some talk submissions for Ruby and Ruby on Rails users, clearly. This stuff is still hot on the web (look at Twitter, and Dopplr, for instance) and there’s lots more out there.

I’m recommending a lot of people work on talks together. I don’t know if this will happen, but we have mashups in this web 2.0 world, I don’t see why we don’t have talk mashups with 2 presenters. Having a co-presenter not only keeps your talk real, but keeps the momentum going (especially when your talk is scheduled early in the morning or after lunch). It can also help nurture yet-another-guru in the area. And if you’re worried about your language or presentation skills, having someone next to you to interject when required, probably helps, heaps.

What do you think about having a co-presenter in your talk? Are you for mashups? Against mashups?

Incidentally, I probably should plug that the CfP closes on Tuesday, October 30 2007. Submit a talk, already.

Technorati Tags: mysql, mysql conference and expo, mysqlconf2008, rails, ruby on rails, ruby, mashups, co-presenter

I’m reviewing proposals, that have come in when we made the CfP for the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008, and I’ve noticed some bugs in the CfP process. So let me take a break, gripe, and go back to the grindstone. I wish more people read the instructions for CfP submission (I’m even referring to you experienced presenters, might I add).

Via the CfP page, it says be creative, descriptive, and specific. I delve into this a little more, and add some of my thoughts.

1. Be creative – sure, a catchy title helps, but I personally review everything, even if you have the world’s most boring title
2. Be descriptive – please, heed to this. Don’t tell me that you’re going to expand on the abstract if its accepted, and don’t tell me to trust you that the content will be good. All these send my internal reviewer radar off the charts, and make me very worried.
3. Be specific – that means, no vague proposals. That means, being descriptive (refer above). I don’t care if your English language skills aren’t up to scratch, because believe it or not, I read every word – so I’m not expecting that you have a literary masterpiece in the first paragraph that makes me want to continue reading the next 5 paragraphs.
4. Buzzwords are famous these days. Acronyms. All this alphabet soup, it does not impress me. If you are using them, be very specific about what it is you’re going to talk about.
5. If you’re going to talk about something that even isn’t public yet, this worries me. Similarly, while I know its fun to release new software at an event (I’ve watched as software gets released live, at the end of the talk), this must be for already existing software, not something that’s going to make its first release at the conference. I have trust issues, I mentioned this up there at #2.
6. If you’ve given a talk previously, about a technology you’re familiar with, and claim to have magical updates/extensions by next year, with nothing really in the form of any buzz around it till say early-November 2007 (i.e. when the CfP’s generally close), this worries me.
7. The magic words “performance tuning” and “benchmarks” by now, you all know is a crowd puller. Abuse of these words make me cringe. Simply, don’t. And if you are, make sure your abstracts are so descriptively tuned and specific.
8. On an important note, that I’m stealing directly from foss.in, I think I should make it clear that I don’t recognise the concept of “status” and rock stars. Maybe you’ll be a rock star after the MySQL Conference.
9. Stealing from Apple, Think Different. Maybe this is like being creative. People aren’t going to come listen to you reiterate your blog entries, but those entries surely help people come see you talk. So market yourself appropriately (because I use the ever-powerful Yahoo! and sometimes Google search engines if I don’t know you well). Show that you’re a thought leader in your area of expertise.
10. Lists are so much better when there are 10 tips. So, yeah, submit a proposal, already!

So, if you haven’t submitted a talk yet, the CfP process closes October 30 2007. If you have submitted a proposal, and want to heed my advice of expanding upon it, I’d strongly advice that. Lastly, these words are my own (I don’t have control if your talk gets approved or not, and I’m not speaking for the others on the voting committee, I just vote, and arguably, rant here), and there probably are a dozen other folk that you have to convince (to get a vote in), besides just me. Baron has a good piece on this, read it if you haven’t. Chocolate (or good scotch) works for me, also ;-)

Technorati Tags: mysql, mysql conference and expo, mysqlconf2008

One of the many reasons to come to a MySQL Meetup, is because you’ll learn something new.

We cater for beginners – Minh Van Nguyen

We cater for the more intermediate – advanced users – Arjen Lentz

You’ll start hacking stuff up, while you’re there!

You also get demonstrations, with live human beings, showing a man-in-the-middle-attack

More photos are at Flickr. Where are your meetup photos?

Technorati Tags: mysql, meetup

I’m not a big fan of the polls, but I do think this one’s fairly significant: What is your primary programming language for developing MySQL applications?

Why? Because this means we know what connectors to give more love to. What kind of articles to write for the DevZone. While we might think Ruby is the next big thing since sliced bread, you folk might tell us that Delphi is probably larger than Ruby and we should be applying appropriate love there (I’m sure this statement is untrue, but for arguments sake, mmmkay?).

To vote, you actually have to click the Community link, to get to the DevZone, scroll down a bit, and get to the MySQL Quickpoll. Why can’t I link directly to the quickpoll? Why can’t you vote on the results page? That is left as an exercise to the reader…

Technorati Tags: languages, mysql, primary, quickpoll, poll, website rants