Colin Charles Agenda

• Reviewed Sergei’s MariaDB in Google Summer of Code 2016
• Reviewed Kaj’s MariaDB Foundation dialogue GDoc/blog
• Accepted to speak at SELF 2016, and also organise the speaking at Nerdear.la in Buenos Aires; tight schedules to make those events
• Prepared for speech in Hanoi for OpenCPS Launch Event; give speech; wrote blog post about it on MariaDB Corporation blog.
• Submitted some talks to Texas Linux Fest, LinuxCon Japan, OSCON/Velocity Europe
• London: MySQL meetup presentation on MySQL ecosystem High Availability options; lots of Q&A, wish we had more time. Good dinner after with Ivan (ScaleDB) and Luisa (MariaDB). MariaDB Corporation team dinner, conversation with Kenneth (CFO) later over a beer. Arrived Somerset House early, did the roadshow from 8.30am-3pm. Did an engagement with SE Luisa as well, which more or less was planning architecture and answering questions; happy user.
• Participated in Community Leadership Summit 2016, in Austin, Texas. Better get used to this location over Portland, Oregon, since its going to happen here again in 2017. Good discussion as usual.
• Paris: SPIDER meeting, MariaDB Server roadshow. Drinks & dinner with some of the community & colleagues.
• Seoul: meetings with new customers
• Google Summer of Code 2016 has started; been coordinating activities between students and mentors
• Looking at making SPIDER better; also the Tencent tree and their SPIDER usage
• Write talk for nerdear.la, the 3 SELF talks
• Meet up with Epidata (partner of MariaDB Corporation in Buenos Aires/Argentina + South American business). Present to clients/prospects about MariaDB Server 10.1. Many are also Amazon users!
• Presented at nerdear.la. Well received.
• Presented at SELF (3 talks). Barely made it to the conference (flight cancellations due to a transport strike in EZE). Fun as always, though I did miss the speaker dinner (one of the highlights; good Southern food).
• Google Summer of Code 2016 mid-term reports; also mentoring my students (I’m co-mentor for one project).
• Accepted a talk for LinuxCon North America, and a tutorial for Velocity Europe.
• Preparing slide decks for the MariaDB finance meetup in NYC (Opensource in the enterprise, Secure Data Management – Threats and Best Practices, Migrating to MariaDB Server). Good discussions at the finance meetup.
• Preparing deck for NYC MySQL meetup (Lessons from database failures). Gave talk.
• Bill & I on a phone call with a bank to clear up cluster related matters
• Admin: filed 4 expense reports
• Customer/prospect email bumped up to us count: 15. Alliances related emails/chats count: 10. Management level emails: 3
• Wrote posts for the MariaDB Corporation blog:
  1. OpenCPS: Vietnam’s Public Sector goes Open Source
  2. Planning for default changes in MariaDB Server 10.2
• Blogged:
  1. London in May 2016
  2. London roadshow wrap-up, see you in Paris next week
  3. Speaking in June 2016

• Planning for May MariaDB Corporation roadshows in London and Paris. The Paris edition is also one where Kentoku Shiba from Spiral Arms will make an appearance; we’re also likely to plan several meetings around there too.
• Planning the MariaDB Berlin Meetup. Getting the speakers from our side. Ensuring that other user groups know.
• Publishing mariadb-mysql-tutorials on Github. Consider this to be a growing repository of how to get stuff done in the various servers in the ecosystem.
• Attended/participated in the MariaDB Corporation company meeting, and the follow-up developer meeting.
• Finishing the decks for rootconf.in & #perconalive Santa Clara. And OSDC.de.
• Delivered keynote for rootconf.in. Had a panel. And also delivered a tutorial.
• Delivered a tutorial for Percona Live – 88 registered, about that showed up, if not a little more. It was a full room, and there was no chance for doing practicals. Talked for 3 hours with a 10 minute break in-between (where I was still just talking…). Delivered a talk about MariaDB Server 10.1 and a sneak peak of 10.2. Lots of meetings, and lots of good conversation here.
• Help where I need to with the upcoming Gartner work.
• MariaDB Corporation had a website redesign; are the download resources going to the correct place? Check with marketing.
• Filed: MDEV-9882: Lack of config defaults in 10.1.13 because I think the out-of-the-box user experience needs to be improved. MDEV-9889
  create ubuntu xenial 16.04 repository. mysql#81051.
• Admin: filed 3 expense reports
• Customer/prospect email bumped up to us count: 7. Alliances related emails/chats count: 2. Management level emails: 9
• Wrote posts for the MariaDB Corporation blog – AliSQL and some features that have made it into MariaDB Server, Automated Server Management with opensource tools, [Modelling databases in a web browser], MariaDB Server growth bolstered by OpenStack User Survey. Also now all this is available in a Github repository: mariadb.com-blog.
• Submit idea to MariaDB Foundation about individual supports and having mariadb.org aliases, something like what the Linux Foundation Individual Supporter program does. After all, we are seeing a List of Donors appear on the MariaDB Foundation site now.
• Blogged:
  1. MariaDB Berlin Meetup
  2. (TWEET) SUMMARY OF PERCONA LIVE 2015
  3. FOSDEM 2016 NOTES
  4. Trip Report: Bulgarian Web Summit
  5. MAJOR POST-GA FEATURES IN THE 5.7 RELEASE!
  6. MARIADB BERLIN MEETUP NOTES & SLIDES

Spent about a week in Lombok for vacation, and there’s been a lot of internal stuff going on that I can’t talk about yet. A quarter now done.

• Reviewed & edited Eating our own dog food — Running JIRA on MariaDB.
• Spend time editing a whitepaper, basically fact-checking it in an in-depth fashion. Giving more low-level feedback.
• Prepare for my talks at FLOSSUK, London and FOSSASIA, Singapore. Had to pull out of speaking in beautiful Prague because I can’t be on two continents at once (and I couldn’t find a replacement speaker from MariaDB Corporation either).
• Created a survey on SurveyMonkey to see what kind of hands on training the MariaDB Corporation Professional Services team would need during the next company meeting.
• Handle Google Summer of Code 2016 admin; answer student questions, etc.
• It would be nice to see XA support for Galera Cluster for further SPIDER integration.
• Gave 2 talks at FLOSSUK and 1 at FOSSASIA.
• Preparing for a busy April: company meeting including training the PS team; rootconf.in in Bangalore (talk and a tutorial), Percona Live Santa Clara (talk and a tutorial), and then osdc.de in Berlin (talk). Tutorials require exercises and this definitely takes some time to prepare.
• Filed: MDEV-9804 FR: sha256_password plugin – this is important for compatibility as SHA1 alone might not clearly be good enough (this was brought up at a conversation at FLOSSUK).
• Spent a week doing customer meetings in Seoul, South Korea. Lots of time going deeper into Oracle 11g / MariaDB Server features, holes, figuring out different architecture ideas, etc. Customers and their Excel sheets; took 4h for one comparison of Q&A! The reportage for this is only for internal company use.
• Setup and deal with meetup.com account for our upcoming Berlin event
• Customer/prospect email bumped up to us count: 9. Alliances related emails/chats count: 4. Management level emails: 5
• Blogged:
  1. Speaking in March 2016
  2. Speaking in April 2016

Yearly reviews happen but when you’re moving in a fast paced world like the Internet (they say every 3 months on the Internet is like a real world year, right?) its nice to keep track of what happens from time-to-time.

Back in the good ‘ole days of Monty Program Ab, we kept up this idea of “weekly reports”, which included time spent, because according to the Hacking Business Model that meant you would add it all up, multiply it by a VIP number, and find out how many shares you would gain. This had the nice tradeoff that you would count how much you’ve worked, and watch how much time you’d “overwork” (or underwork) in a 2-week period, and anything in excess of 75 hours was noted in a field called “balance hours”. You could then take this time off at your will, just like vacation time (which was extremely generous at MPAb). Bottom-line: you were rewarded for every bit of time you put into the company!

Long story short, since quite a lot of the work I do is public-facing, I might as well try keeping logs of what happens in a public fashion, no?

Short January, I spent half of it on vacation (year end thing) and the other half working. February was a little longer but I also spent a week on vacation. Got to love all the public holidays that are peppered in-between.

• Spoke at SCALE14x, did some booth duty, got to catch up with a few colleagues and people within the community. Big mistake for me is coming back from a long vacation only to go to an event within the same week — makes it hard to prep material as well as deal with deluge that is one’s INBOX.
• Attended MonkiGras, which focused on making stuff, and I was truly inspired. Again great networking.
• Attended FOSDEM, splitting time between the distributions and MySQL & friends tracks, as well as the main conference. This is a huge event, and meetings happen everywhere (I even did some breakfast meetings). Another highlight was of course the MySQL Community Dinner which was great to be at, good food made with love, wonderful beer and not to forget that MariaDB Corporation was also a sponsor.
• Attended ConfMgmtCamp which is proving to be a truly great add-on to FOSDEM. Ghent is nearby, the content is amazing, and this is stuff we have to always focus on.
• Meeting with Kaj (MariaDB Corporation) in Munich. 1:1 was short, as we also had Product Manager Ralf Gebhardt join in.
• Visited Sofia, Bulgaria for the first time — Bulgarian Web Summit is a huge event with over 800+ attendees and they really enjoyed learning about MariaDB Server (spent about as long as the talk after it, answering questions).
• Applied to and approved for Google Summer of Code 2016, so we are a mentoring organisation again.
• Contributed to an upcoming whitepaper for MariaDB Corporation.
• Answered 17 questions from prospects and customers that sales (engineering) bumped up to us; 1 support question; many from marketing
• Sent various people slides for them to repurpose things for webminars, or just look at it for reference material
• Talk about Planet MariaDB with marketing; no we don’t run it. But yes, it would be nice if there were more filters applied to it.
• MariaDB Server won Database of the Year for the LinuxQuestions forums.
• Many people are interested in InfiniDB from Japan to Bulgaria.
• Talk about the Paris & London roadshows; agree to participation.
• Got my account on the The MariaDB Knowledgebase fixed; there’s SSO now so I guess the only thing that has a different account now is Jira.
• I don’t report as many bugs as I would like, but here’s a few: MDEV-9458: FR: Super read-only mode, MDEV-9582: FR: Ansible galaxy roles, and MDEV-9658: FR: Add RocksDB as a storage engine to MariaDB Server.
• I made a few posts to the lists, but the one I’m most happy about was Aliasing slave_parallel_workers/slave_parallel_threads. Why? Because within a week, there was discussion, this was done and pushed to 10.2. I’m also hoping we start seeing Time delayed replication appear soon. Transportable tablespaces is something still to investigate when it comes to documentation.
• Blogged:
  1. SCALE14x – lots of MySQL content there
  2. FOSDEM 2016 – See you in Brussels
  3. Donating to an opensource project when you download it
  4. SCALE14x trip report
  5. Amazon RDS updates February 2016