Citus Blog

Articles tagged: conference talks

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.

Keep reading

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 2024]: For the 3rd year in a row, I’m the chair of the talk selection team for a free and virtual developer conference that is now called POSETTE: An Event for Postgres, formerly called Citus Con. I’ve also served on talk selection committees for PgDaySF 2020 and PGDay Chicago 2024. Wearing my talk selection team hat, as I reached out to spread the word about open CFPs such as the CFP for POSETTE, 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.

Keep reading
Marco Slot

Citus Talk at CMU: Distributed PostgreSQL as an Extension

Written byBy Marco Slot | April 10, 2021Apr 10, 2021

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:

Keep reading

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."

Keep reading
Claire Giordano

Tips on how to get your conference talk SELECTED

Written byBy Claire Giordano | January 16, 2020Jan 16, 2020

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
Keep reading
Will Leinweber

\watch ing Star Wars in Postgres

Written byBy Will Leinweber | December 14, 2018Dec 14, 2018

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.

Keep reading
Claire Giordano

All the things coming soon to PostgresOpen SV 2018

Written byBy Claire Giordano | July 29, 2018Jul 29, 2018

In this world of all things digital where so many of us are online so much of the time—what with architecting, coding, QA'ing, blogging, and slacking—it's kind of refreshing to step away from our devices and talk to other humans face-to-face at an event.

Especially when it's a conference chock full of PostgreSQL open source people, from users to developers to community leaders.

Especially when it's right in our own backyard here in San Francisco.

Especially when it's PostgresOpen SV 2018.

Keep reading
Craig Kerstiens

PGConf EU: HyperLogLog, Eclipse, and Distributed Postgres

Written byBy Craig Kerstiens | December 11, 2017Dec 11, 2017

We're big fans of Postgres and enjoy getting around to the various community conferences to give talks on relevant topics as well as learn from others. A few months ago we had a good number of Citus team members over at the largest Postgres conference in Europe. Additionally, three of our Citus team members gave talks at the conference. We thought for those of you that couldn't make the conference you might still enjoy getting a glimpse of some of the content. You can browse the full set of talks that were given and slides for them on the PGConf EU website or flip through the presentations from members of the Citus team below.

Keep reading

Page 2 of 3