Lots of stuff will be discussed, including configuration, understanding status variables, finding bad queries, schema tips, etc.

Wonder if he will let me steal away in his luggage?

I will be presenting on what for me is a constant struggle – to balance your home and work life when you telecommute. I must admit that I and my family fight with this every day.

If you want learn more about telecommuting, what is involved, what tools are needed and how to talk to your boss about setting up a telecommuting program, I hope you will consider joining us!

Day 1:
- Documents, documents, documents by Matthew Weier O’Phinney. I particularly enjoyed that this was focused on the software architectural design and was system agnostic for the document database.
- Technical Debt by Elizabeth Naramore. Her no nonsense discussion and interaction with the audience kept this discussion interesting and engaging. The ideas and concepts discussed were something that every developer and manager should understand.
- Demystifying PostgreSQL by Asher Snyder. I have been wanting to look at PostgreSQL for years, I just never seem to have the time to do it. This was a nice intro to the system and its capabilities which I have to admit, are pretty dang cool.

Day 2:
- EXPLAIN – yeah it was my own talk, but hey – I was there!
- Pragmatic Guide to Git by Travis Swicegood Travis is a gifted speaker that manages to draw you in with his enthusiasm. His clear logical walk through of the basics of Git covers all the commands that a beginner will need.
- Infobright DB by Jeff Kibler This was a talk that I originally went to mostly out of curiosity. Once they started I found myself highly interested (data warehousing and mining is an interest of mine) not just for what they did – but how they did it.
- Welcome to the Dark Side: We have Brownies by Josh Holmes. The talk was informative, engaging, and just all around fun. Turns out Microsoft isn’t so bad after all… I mean – they had brownies even

Day 3:
Umm – slept late and then just practiced my last talk… Since it was on the last set of talks on the last day..

Missed a number of keynotes – did some volunteer work manning the PHP Community booth, but really enjoyed the “Dries” and “ROI” ones.

The various parties/after-parties (official and otherwise) were awesome with more then a few hangovers showing up the next day.

And as a minor side note – I also really enjoyed the Running MySQL at Scale tech talk at Facebook while I was there. Learned quite a bit and also got to see Domas again. I missed his brand of craziness.

My family has a history with breast cancer so while I do not say much about it, this is a subject near and dear to my heart. In my case, it was a male member of the family that was diagnosed a few years ago. He unfortunately found out about it too late and passed away within 6 months of the diagnosis. So men, though this is primarily discussed in association with women, you also need to take care.

Since the percentage of men getting breast cancer is so low and my grandmother had ovarian cancer as well (there is a link between the two), my mother was tested for the BRCA1 and 2 genes and thankfully was cleared. Admittedly this does not mean I can not get breast cancer, but does rule out the genetic factor – mostly. Because of my family history, I am still checked every 6 months and get an annual mammogram even though I am younger then is normally recommended (40).

Breast Cancer effects us all.

Some links:
American Cancer Society: http://www.cancer.org/docroot/home/index.asp
National Cancer Institute – Breast Cancer: http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/types/breast
Relay for Life: http://www.relayforlife.org/relay/
National Breast Cancer Awareness Month: http://www.nbcam.org/
Susan G Komen Foundation: http://ww5.komen.org/
Save the ta-tas: http://www.savethetatas.com/index.php/mission/
Genetic testing for Breast and Ovarian Cancer risk: http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/Genetic-Testing-for-Breast-and-Ovarian-Cancer-Risk

So to try and improve myself on all those “soft skills” that I either don’t have or never thought I needed, I will be attending the Day Camp for Developers online conference.

It is a technology agnostic, inexpensive (only $35), one day (Saturday, November 6th), online event. Check it out!

I look forward to seeing everyone there!

The conference started out with the typical day 0 – Tutorials Day. I only attended the MongoDB talk mostly to learn a bit about it. Kristina was a wonderful speaker who really knew her stuff. And as a MySQL geek, I have to admit that it was interesting seeing seeing my world (RDBMS world) from a different perspective. I even managed not to say a single thing throughout the entire talk though there were a couple of times the others I was with had fun laughing at me holding back.

The first actual day of the conference started out with Josh Holmes keynote on The Lost Art of Simplicity. It was a fabulous talk that forced me to find myself on the wrong side more then once.

From there I went to Eli White’s talk on Anti-Spam and Anti-Gaming. The talk again was extremely interesting and some of his ideas would never of occurred to me. Good thing we have Eli to teach me.

On to Joel Perras’s talk on Graphs, Edges, and Nodes. Again a fabulous talk, that I have to admit – lost me a bit. But it is something I definitely want to learn more about.

From there to Large Scale Systems with David Strauss. This was one of the best talks I will be in at the conference. Learned lots – most of which I did not know enough to ask about… but I do now.

After that I kinda got into practicing for my own presentations and missed a lot in the actual sessions, but still enjoyed the hallway track. I must admit that it has been quite a while since I attended that many sessions at a conference, and all of them top notch talks.

As for my own talks, I thought they went well and seem to be well received. You can find the slides for my talks on my Presentations page.

So to wrap up I had a fabulous time at the conference, learning lots and hopefully teaching others stuff they did not know. I can’t wait for next years.

The talks this year included the intermediate to expert level 5.5 Performance and Scalability improvements talk and and introductory talk to MySQL’s 5.1 Replication.

The conference this year will be held from May 18-21 at the Sheraton Gateway Suites O’Hare (same as the past couple of years). If you have already been to the conference, you already know about playing Tek frogger – and if you don’t or this is your first conference – be sure to find me at the conference so we can discuss it as we sit and have a drink at “Shirtless Slim’s”.

For those that are interested I will be giving 2 talks on MySQL this year. One will be an introduction to MySQL replication and the other will go over the new features found in MySQL 5.5. Both are new talks for me, so I am rather excited about speaking on the subjects and would love feedback.

I hope to see you there!

If you find any bad links/posts please let me know so I can fix them. And tell me what you think of this new theme.