Colin Charles Agenda

A few events, but mostly circling around London:

• Open collaboration – an O’Reilly Online Conference, at 10am PT, Tuesday September 13 2016 – I’m going to be giving a new talk titled Forking Successfully. I’ve seen how the platform works, and I’m looking forward to trying this method out (its like a webminar but not quite!)
• September MySQL London Meetup – I’m going to focus on MySQL, a branch, Percona Server and the fork MariaDB Server. This will be interesting because one of the reasons you don’t see a huge Emacs/XEmacs push after about 20 years? Feature parity. And the work that’s going into MySQL 8.0 is mighty interesting.
• Operability.io should be a fun event, as the speakers were hand-picked and the content is heavily curated. I look forward to my first visit there.

I’m happy to speak at Percona Live Europe Amsterdam 2016 again this year (just look at the awesome schedule). On my agenda:

• Monday Oct 3 Tutorial: Best Practices of MySQL High Availability
• Monday Oct 3 Tutorial: The Complete MariaDB Tutorial
• Wednesday Oct 5 Talk: Securing your MySQL/MariaDB data with my friend, Ronald Bradford.
• Wednesday Oct 5 Talk: Lessons from database failures.

I’m also signed up for the Community Dinner @ Booking.com, and I reckon you should as well – only 35 spots remain!

Go ahead and register now. You should be able to search Twitter or the Percona blog for discount codes :-)

I know this is a tad late, but there have been some changes, etc. recently, so apologies for the delay of this post. I still hope to meet many of you to chat about MySQL/Percona Server/MariaDB Server, MongoDB, open source databases, and open source in general in the remainder of August 2016.

• LinuxCon+ContainerCon North America – August 22-24 2016 – Westin Harbour Castle, Toronto, Canada – I’ll be speaking about lessons one can learn from database failures and enjoying the spectacle that is the 25th anniversary of Linux!
• Chicago MySQL Meetup Group – August 29 2016 – Vivid Seats, Chicago, IL – more lessons from database failures here, and I’m looking forward to meeting users, etc. in the Chicago area

While not speaking, Vadim Tkachenko and I will be present at the @scale conference. I really enjoyed my time there previously, and if you get an invite, its truly a great place to learn and network.

I received an overwhelming number of comments when I said I was leaving MariaDB Corporation. Thank you – it is really nice to be appreciated.

I haven’t left the MySQL ecosystem. In fact, I’ve joined Percona as their Chief Evangelist in the CTO Office, and I’m going to focus on the MySQL/Percona Server/MariaDB Server ecosystem, while also looking at MongoDB and other solutions that are good for Percona customers. Thanks again for the overwhelming response on the various social media channels, and via emails, calls, etc.

Here’s to a great time at Percona to focus on open source databases and solutions around them!

My first blog post on the Percona blog – I’m Colin Charles, and I’m here to evangelize open source databases!, the press release.

I posted a message to the internal mailing lists at MariaDB Corporation. I have departed (I resigned) the company, but definitely not the community. Thank you all for the privilege of serving the large MariaDB Server community of users, all 12 million+ of you. See you on the mailing lists, IRC, and the developer meetings.

The Japanese have a saying, “leave when the cherry blossoms are full”.

I’ve been one of the earliest employees of this post-merge company, and was on the founding team of the MariaDB Server having been around since 2009. I didn’t make the first company meeting in Mallorca (August 2009) due to the chickenpox, but I’ve been to every one since.

We made the first stable MariaDB Server 5.1 release in February 2010. Our first Linux distribution release was in openSUSE. Our then tagline: MariaDB: Community Developed. Feature Enhanced. Backward Compatible.

In 2013, we had to make a decision: merge with our sister company SkySQL or take on investment of equal value to compete; majority of us chose to work with our family.

Our big deal was releasing MariaDB Server 5.5 – Wikipedia migrated, Google wanted in, and Red Hat pushed us into the enterprise space.

Besides managing distributions and other community related activities (and in the pre-SkySQL days Rasmus and I did everything from marketing to NRE contract management, down to even doing press releases – you wear many hats when you’re in a startup of less than 20 people), in this time, I’ve written over 220 blog posts, spoken at over 130 events (an average of 18 per year), and given generally over 250 talks, tutorials and keynotes. I’ve had numerous face-to-face meetings with customers, figuring out what NRE they may need and providing them solutions. I’ve done numerous internal presentations, audience varying from the professional services & support teams, as well as the management team. I’ve even technically reviewed many books, including one of the best introductions by our colleague, Learning MySQL & MariaDB.

Its been a good run. Seven years. Uncountable amount of flights. Too many weekends away working for the cause. A whole bunch of great meetings with many of you. Seen the company go from bootstrap, merger, Series A, and Series B.

It’s been a true privilege to work with many of you. I have the utmost respect for Team MariaDB (and of course my SkySQL brethren!). I’m going to miss many of you. The good thing is that MariaDB Server is an open source project, and I’m not going to leave the project or #maria. I in fact hope to continue speaking and working on MariaDB Server.

I hope to remain connected to many of you.

Thank you for this great privilege.

Kind Regards,
Colin Charles

I was wondering why my disk space was reducing pretty quickly on my Mac, and it turns out my ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.bird/ directory was 92GB in size! Inspecting some of the larger files, I notice that it has a WhatsApp header, which suggests that these are my WhatsApp iCloud backups.

There obviously seems to be some kind of bug as I have files, one per day, from sometime in April. They all start around 800MB and grow to 2GB in size. Each.

It seems like there are other files there too, and I wasn’t sure if deleting it would just make sense. The solution? System Preferences -> iCloud then toggle iCloud Drive off. There is a warning about how it will delete all iCloud documents from your Mac. Its all good considering this is supposed to be saved in the cloud right? Restart it, and voila, you see the directory go down to 0 bytes.

Something up with the bird daemon? I don’t know if brctl would help in any way, so I’m happy there’s an easier way to recover lost space.