Ultimate Guide to POSETTE: An Event for Postgres, 2024 edition

Written by Claire Giordano
June 5, 2024

This post by Claire Giordano was originally published on the Microsoft Tech Community Blog.

Now in its 3rd year, POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2024 is not only bigger than previous years but some of my Postgres friends who are speakers tell me the event is even better than past years. Sweet.

Formerly called Citus Con (yes, we did a rename), POSETTE is a free and virtual developer event happening Jun 11-13 that is chock-full of Postgres content—with 4 livestreams, 42 talks, and 44 speakers.

And while POSETTE is organized by the Postgres team here at Microsoft, there is a lot of PG community involvement. For example, 31 of the 44 speakers (~70%) are from outside Microsoft! We have also tried to be quite transparent about the talk selection process used for POSETTE 2024, if you’re curious.

On the schedule, the add to calendar links (in upper right of each livestream's tab) are quite useful for blocking your calendar—and the calendar appointments include a link to where you can watch the livestreams on the POSETTE site.

So what exactly is on the schedule for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2024? A lot! When you look at the schedule page, be sure to check out all 4 tabs, so you don’t miss all the unique talks in Livestreams 2, 3, and 4.

screenshot of Posette 2024 schedule - 4 livestreams
Figure 1: Screenshot of the Schedule page for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2024, with arrows pointing to the different tabs for each livestream.

There’s something “accessible” about virtual events

As much as many of us 🧡 in-person Postgres events—I just returned from PGConf.dev 2024 in Vancouver which was so much fun1—I am also a big fan of the accessibility of the virtual format.

  • Why? Because not everybody can travel to in-person conferences: Not everyone has the budget (or the time, or the schedule flexibility). So it’s rewarding to collaborate with all these knowledgeable speakers to produce video talks you can watch from the comfort of your very own desk. With espresso (or tea) in hand.

Speaking of accessibility, let's talk captions. All the talk videos published on YouTube will have captions available in 14 languages. The POSETTE team QA’s and fixes the English captions first and then generates the translated captions based on the improved baseline version.

  • Captions available in 14 languages: Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish

So much gratitude for all these POSETTE speakers

The raison d’être for most conferences is to learn from each other—and in particular, to learn from the speakers. So before diving into this Ultimate Guide we want to say thank you to all of the amazing the speakers who have brought so much knowledge and enthusiasm to POSETTE this year.

Gratitude to POSETTE 2024 speakers
Figure 2: Headshots from the amazing Postgres experts who are speakers in this year’s event.

TIP about Speaker Interviews: Some of the speakers submitted speaker interviews. So if you want to know more about these Postgres experts, just click on the links to their talks below and you’ll be taken to their speaker page, which includes the talk abstract, a link to the livestream schedule, links to any past POSETTE talks—plus the speaker interview, if they submitted one!

Gratitude for our Livestream hosts too

There is a fun lineup of Postgres people from inside and outside Microsoft to co-host the 4 livestreams, including Boriss Mejías, Claire Giordano (that’s me) Floor Drees, Jelte Fennema-Nio, Krishnakumar (KK) Ravi, Melanie Plageman, and Pino de Candia.

Big +1 to all these folks for volunteering their time and their commentary to hosting the livestreams.

How to watch the POSETTE livestreams?

Each of the 4 livestreams has its own Add to calendar link which should be easy to find on that Livestream’s tab on the POSETTE Schedule.

And when you use the Add to calendar links to block your calendar, the calendar invites include instructions on:

  • WHERE to watch the livestreams: POSETTE event homepage
    • TIP: be sure to reload the POSETTE homepage on the day of the event, so you’re not viewing some cached older version of the page or a replay of a previous livestream.
  • WHERE to check out the schedule = POSETTE schedule page

How to participate in the official back-channel for POSETTE?

  • WHERE to join the virtual hallway track = #posetteconf channel on the Microsoft Open Source Discord.

You can join the channel now, no need to wait, that way you’ll be all setup before the conference.

What’s the benefit to you of joining the virtual hallway track, also known as the “official back-channel”? Most of the speakers have signed up to be available on the virtual hallway track whilst their talks are being livestreamed. So it’s your opportunity to ask speakers questions—and to be part of the conversation, and make some Postgres friends.

POSETTE 2024 Virtual Hallway Track
Figure 3: Join the virtual hallway track before, during, and after the Livestreams to be part of the POSETTE conversation. Most of the speakers have signed up to be on the #posetteconf channel whilst their talk is being livestreamed so it's a good chance to ask questions and go deeper.

Will the recordings be available after the event?

Yes! All the POSETTE talks will be published online on YouTube after the event is over, so you can watch all 42 talks at your convenience, on your own schedule—even at 2X speed. With captions available in at least 14 languages.

Still, we hope you join us during the actual livestreams to be part of the live text chat.

Now let’s explore the different categories of talks you’ll see at POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2024.

Ultimate Guide to POSETTE 2024 stats
Figure 4: Overview of the different categories of talks in POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2024, a free and virtual developer event full of Postgres talks—from the nerdy to the sublime.

4 amazing Keynotes, one for each livestream

Each of the 4 POSETTE livestreams has its own invited keynote. The keynote speakers were hand-selected and invited to come tell their story at POSETTE. We're so happy they said yes—and that they will be sharing their open source, developer, cloud, and community experiences with us.

7 AI-related talks

With everything happening with pgvector and Postgres, it’s not a surprise that there was a plethora of AI talk submissions at this year’s POSETTE. In the end, we landed on 7 AI-related talks.

In alphabetical order by talk title:

15 Postgres core talks

Lots of Postgres goodness here. In alphabetical order by talk title:

8 Postgres ecosystem talks

“Ecosystem” is the “E” in the middle of POSETTE. In alphabetical order by talk title:

8 Azure Database for PostgreSQL talks

4 Postgres community talks

Please tell your friends & mark your calendars for this year’s POSETTE

If you are into PostgreSQL and into continuous learning, join us on Jun 11-13. No travel required.

And if you do the social media thing and want to help spread the word about the POSETTE livestreams to your friends and networks, you can follow @PosetteConf on X/Twitter to stay connected—or you can follow us on Mastodon or also on Threads.

Final thank you’s

And while this blog post has already thanked the 44 speakers and 7 livestream co-hosts, it’s time to thank everyone at Microsoft involved in organizing POSETTE 2024 especially the organizing chair Teresa Giacomini. And immense gratitude to the talk selection team without whom we wouldn’t have this amazing roster of talks.

We hope you get a lot of value out of POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2024. Happy learning!

Footnotes

  1. Not only was PGConf.dev fun, but according to Postgres committer Peter Eisentraut the conference was so engaging that nothing happened in the Postgres code base for days. PGConf.dev appears to be the cause of the “longest hiatus [in Postgres commits] in over 20 years and the 4th-longest of all time.” Says Peter Eisentraut, “It might never be this quiet again!” ↩
Claire Giordano

Written by Claire Giordano

Head of open source community efforts for Postgres at Microsoft. Alum of Citus Data, Amazon, Sun Microsystems, and Brown University CS. Conference speaker at PGConfEU, PGConfdev, FOSDEM, PGConf NYC, Nordic PGDay, pgDay Paris, PGDay Chicago, Swiss PGDay, & Citus Con. Talk Selection Team chair for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres. Loves sailing in Greece.

@clairegiordano @clairegiordano@hachyderm.io clairegiordano

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