I am currently planning to attend the Tampa Barcamp on the Dev day (Sept 26th) with my good friend Davey Shafik. And like a good camper (think that is the term they use), I have a few MySQL talks ready to present if the crowd wants/picks them for the schedule. I am both excited and happy to finally be able to lose my complete n00b status and be able to say I have been to a barcamp!

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!

While there I will also be presenting 2 talks on MySQL – one on MySQL server tuning and the other on EXPLAIN. I admit it – I love MySQL optimization. If you do too, be sure to join me though I am admittedly.. kinda upset that I will be opposite Lorna‘s talk on using and understanding open source communities. That was one talk I wanted to attend myself. If I am lucky she will let me look over her slides afterwards

If you are going to be there also and have time on your hands… maybe we can get together for a little bit of sight seeing in the city. I’m game for just about anything though museums, theatre and typical tourist stuff is what I enjoy. Gahh – why did it have to be a week that the cubs are away! I would have paid $100 for good seats to watch them play in Wrigley Field.

Anyway – drop me a line if you want to get together and do something.

Anyway – for those that will be there, make sure to stop by our booth and pick yourself up a PHPWomen sticker (for your laptop, car, bag or anywhere else you can think of). Or if you just want to talk about what we are and what we are doing or the weather – that is great too. Come out and meet me!

Somehow the conference comes up on the #phpc channel – who is going, who is thinking of going and who is speaking at the conference. We comment that we are car pooling it up – and poof! We have more people wanting to get in on it. At it’s height we had potentially 8 people going with us – though most ended up backing out. As it stands now, we are down to 4 (Davey, Ben Ramsey, Elizabeth Naramore and I) last I heard. It is pretty cool since we will picking up fresh meat drivers people as we go north so no one person will have to do all the driving.

I figure by the end of the road trip up and back… we will have become closer friends then we are now or will be ready to kill each other. Not quite sure which is more likely One thing is definite – we will have gotten to know each other well and isn’t that the goal of the community.

Today was a busy day. We hit up the Housing office (only got lost twice trying to find it) to see if they have any referrals for the area we want to live in (they don’t). So we took a drive to the area to just look around the area and maybe for a realtor. Liked the area (on a clear drive it is only 20 minutes away from the base) and found a real estate company that seems nice. Got a number of potential places to cruise through the neighborhoods to see if we like them. Talked to the bank about getting a mortgage and need to call a number to get a pre-qualifying value so we have a better idea of how much we can spend. Took a base tour to see some of the base’s services (gas is 2.96 on base) only to find they aren’t many and they are much smaller then we are used to but that is OK since we will primarily getting stuff out in town.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving so everything will be closed. Sounds like a wonderful time to just sit back and relax for the day. Friday is soon enough to run around some more.