Citus Blog

A developer friend of mine prefers to read about what to expect at upcoming events in the narrative form of a blog, rather than having to click in and out of different abstracts on a schedule page.

So this ultimate guide post is my gift to those of you who want to know more about the 37 talks that will be presented at this year’s 2nd annual Citus Con: An Event for Postgres 2023—and who want to read about it in blog post form.

And yes, Citus Con is virtual again this year! This means you can watch all the livestream & on-demand talks from the comfort of your very own desk—and chit-chat in the virtual hallway track on the #cituscon channel on Discord.

[Update in May 2023]: It’s a wrap! The categories in this ultimate guide will help you find the talks which are most useful to you and your work/interests. Or you can jump straight to the playlist of all 37 Citus Con 2023 talks on YouTube.

So what’s on the schedule at Citus Con: An Event for Postgres 2023, exactly? Be sure to check out both tabs on the Schedule page, both the Live Sessions & the On-Demand Sessions tabs, to learn about the:

For those of you looking to give a talk at a Postgres conference, some good news: the CFP is open for Citus Con: An Event for Postgres 2023. Citus Con is a free and virtual developer event happening next April, hosted by the Postgres and Citus teams at Microsoft.

Carpe diem, as the CFP will close on Feb 5, 2023 at 11:59pm PST.

Videos of all of the Citus Con talks will be published online for the world to see, including on YouTube—so the reach of your talk is not limited to the day of the event.

Because it’s a virtual event, you won’t need to travel to give your talk. And you don’t need to worry about the process of recording your talk: the organizers take care of the video recording and production—all you need is a decent webcam and microphone. You can see from the playlist of last year’s Citus Con talks that the production values of the videos are quite good.

One of the good things with a virtual event like Citus Con is that you have a lot of flexibility about where and when to watch the talks. From your home office, or a café, or the beach—or even the car, while you wait to pick up your kids. As long as you have an internet connection, you’re in.

But you still need to figure out which talks and livestreams you want to watch when the event goes live on Tuesday, April 12. To help you out, we’ve created this guide to Citus Con: An Event for Postgres. And just for kicks I’m calling it the “Ultimate Guide” to CitusCon. (Ha! Since this is a first time event maybe it will be the only guide to Citus Con. Therefore definitely “ultimate”.)

In working on this event—I’m a co-chair along with Teresa Giacomini, also head of the talk selection team—I realized I had “tagged and categorized” each and every talk both in my head and on a spreadsheet. So that’s what this blog post will give you… a framework for knowing which talks are in which categories.

Of course, if you want to see the abstracts for all the talks, just pop over to the Schedule & Sessions page for Citus Con.

When you find yourself answering the same questions again and again, it’s a good idea to blog about it. Which is why this post about Citus Con: An Event for Postgres exists: to answer your questions, and share the news about this first-ever, inaugural event.

Citus Con: An Event for Postgres is a free and virtual developer event happening in April 2022, organized by the Postgres and Citus team here at Microsoft. Speakers will come from different parts of the Postgres ecosystem, including Postgres users, Citus open source users, Azure Database for PostgreSQL customers, and developers/experts in PostgreSQL and Postgres extensions, like Citus.

The Call for Proposals (CFP) for Citus Con is open until Feb 6th. Whether this will be your 1000th conference talk or your very 1st, we’d love to see what Postgres experiences you have to share.

If you’ve never done it before, you might be daunted by the idea of giving a conference talk. You know: the work involved, the butterflies, how to make it a good talk and not a boring one, the people who might judge you… And perhaps the hardest bit: choosing a topic others will find interesting.

[Updated for 2023]: For the 2nd year in a row, I’m the co-chair of a free and virtual developer conference called Citus Con: An Event for Postgres. Wearing my talk selection team hat, as I reached out to spread the word about the CFP for Citus Con, people would sometimes ask:

Why give a talk at a Postgres conference?

This post will walk you through the ways you, your team, your project—and especially the Postgres community—can benefit from a talk you give.

Last month we released Citus 10 and we’ve received an overwhelming amount of positive feedback on the new columnar compression and single node Citus features, as well as the news that we’ve open sourced the shard rebalancer.

The new and exciting Citus 10 features are bringing in lots of new users of Citus open source and the Citus database service on Azure. And many of you are asking:

I recently gave a talk about the Citus extension to Postgres at the Warsaw PostgreSQL Users Group. Unfortunately, I did not get to go in person to beautiful Warsaw, but it was still a nice way to interact with the global Postgres community and talk about what Citus is, how it works, and what it can do for you.

This year, I was so excited about doing a workshop about optimizing Python & Django apps with Postgres superpowers for the PyCon 2020 conference.

Working with other developers on performance is something I always find amazing. So props to the Python people at Microsoft who encouraged my team to create a workshop on Postgres for PyCon 2020. Thank you to Nina Zakharenko, Dan Taylor, & Crystal Kelch.

Alas, we had to change our plans and find other ways to share the PostgreSQL workshop content that we had prepared. So I created a video on the topic of database performance for Django developers, to help teach you the PostgreSQL tips and tricks that have served me well in optimizing my Django apps. These tips are what I call “Postgres superpowers.”

As I get ready for the PgDay San Francisco event that is happening next Tue 21 January—a one-day, single-track Postgres community event at the awesome Swedish American Hall in SF—I’m reflecting a bit on how important the speakers are to developer events. Let’s face it, without speakers, there would be no conference.

And because I was on the PgDaySF talk selection committee, I’ve had some good conversations these last few months about CFPs, conference talks, how talk selection committees work, and how you can improve your chances at getting your proposals accepted. So I thought it would be useful to walk through the tips I’ve accumulated on how to get your conference talk accepted—at a Postgres conference, or at any developer conference.

These tips are premised on the notion that a good conference talk requires these 4 things:

1. interestingness: a topic people will care about—and learn from
2. knowledgeable speaker who knows their subject & can communicate effectively with an audience—so people can follow, understand, and learn
3. a hook: a compelling title & abstract that will hook people and entice them to attend
4. fits holistically into the rest of the lineup: a talk that complements the rest of the talks at the event, that adds something unique, and doesn’t overlap the other talks in a significant way

I recently had the honor of speaking at the last Keep Ruby Weird. A good part of the talk dealt with Postgres and since Citus Data is not only a database company but also a Postgres company, I figured sharing those parts on the Citus Data blog would be a good idea. If you’d like to see it in talk form, or you’d also like to know how to watch movies rendered as emojis in your terminal, I encourge you to watch the talk.