Last week I MCed the first Extension Ecosystem Summit EU and attended my first at PGConf EU in Athens, Greece. Despite my former career as an archaeologist — with a focus on Mediterranean cultures, no less! — this was my first visit to Greece. My favorite moment was the evening after the Summit, when I cut out of a networking shindig to walk to Pláka and then circumnavigate the Acropolis. I mean just look at this place!

Highlight of the trip for sure. But the Summit and conference were terrific, as well.

Extension Ecosystem Summit

Floor Drees kindly organized The Extension Ecosystem Summit EU, the follow-up to the PGConf.dev original. While the Vancouver Summit focused on developers, we tailored this iteration to users. I started the gathering with a condensed version of my POSETTE talk, “State of the Postgres Extension Ecosystem”, but updated with a Trunk OCI Distribution demo. Links:

• PDF
• PDF with Notes
• Keynote

We then moved into a lightning round of 10 minute introductions to a variety of extensions:

• Jimmy Angelakos showed off pg_statviz, a “minimalist extension and utility pair for time series analysis and visualization of PostgreSQL internal statistics”.
• Adam Hendel gave a brief history of pgmq, is a “lightweight message queue like AWS SQS and RSMQ, but on Postgres.”
• Gülçin Yıldırım Jelínek introduced pgzx, “a library for developing PostgreSQL extensions written in Zig.”
• James Sewell talked about pgvectorscale and pgai for managing machine training workloads on Postgres.
• Alastair Turner described pg_tde, an extension that provides transparent data encryption for Postgres.

Quite the whirlwind! There followed open discussion, in which each maintainer went to a corner to talk to attendees about contributing to their extensions. Details to come in a more thorough writeup on the Tembo blog, but I personally enjoyed some fascinating discussions about extension distribution challenges.

PGConf.eu

Following the Summit, I attended several thought-provoking and provocative presentations at PGConf.eu, which took place at the same hotel, conveniently enough.

• In the conference keynote, Stacey Haysler explained the The PostgreSQL License Fee. I’m pleased to say that my employer “pays” license fee!
• Andres Freund (yes, that one) summarized NUMA vs PostgreSQL, covering some of the issues and opportunities for optimization of PostgreSQL on servers using the NUMA multi-processor memory architecture.
• Heikki Linnakangas offered an overview of The Wire Protocol, that bit of PostgreSQL technology that lets clients talk to PostgreSQL.
• Ophir Lojkine and Thomas Guillemard showed how a pretty sweet framework, SQLPage, lets archaeologists like Thomas write complete web applications in pure SQL, enabling rapid data entry while in the field.
• Tomas Vondra’s Performance Archaeology dug into the history of PostgreSQL improvements, mapping their compounding returns over time.
• Floor Drees (photo above) talked about Supporting extensions, but really now, making a strong case for the need to organize infrastructure to support the broader extension ecosystem.

There were many more talks, but clearly I tend to be drawn to the most technical, core-oriented topics. And also archaeology.

Museums

Speaking of which, I made time to visit two museums while in Athens. First up was the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, where I was delighted to explore the biggest collection of Mycenaean artifacts I’ve ever seen, including massive collections from the excavations of Heinrich Schliemann. So much great Bronze Age stuff here. I mean, just look at this absolute unit:

The animal decorations on Mycenaean and Akrotiri pottery is simply delightful. I also enjoyed the Hellenistic stuff, and seeing the famed Antikythera Mechanism filled my nerd heart with joy. A good 3 hours poking around; I’ll have to go back and spend a few days there sometime. Thanks to my pal Evan Stanton for gamely wandering around this fantastic museum with me.

Immediately after the PGConf.eu closing session, I dashed off to the Acropolis Museum, which stays open till 10 on Fridays. Built in 2009, this modern concrete-and-glass building exhibits several millennia of artifacts and sculpture exclusively excavated from the Acropolis or preserved from its building façades. No photography allowed, alas, but I snapped this photo looking out on the Acropolis from the top floor.

I was struck by the beauty and effectiveness of the displays. It easily puts the lie to the assertion that the Elgin Marbles must remain in the British Museum to protect them. I saw quite a few references to the stolen sculptures, particularly empty spots and artfully sloppy casts from the originals, but the building itself makes the strongest case that the marbles should be returned.

But even without them there remains a ton of beautiful sculpture to see. Highly recommended!

Back to Work

Now that my sojourn in Athens has ended, I’m afraid I must return to work. I mean, the event was work, too; I talked to a slew of people about a number of projects in flight. More on those soon.

I recently got back in touch with a friend from college via Facebook. She asked me, “So David give me the 411? Whats been up with you for oh? 15 years?” Facebook’s Wall doesn’t seem to care much for multi-paragraph posts, but it kind of makes sense to post it in my blog anyway.

Julie and I moved to Florida in January, 1994 for a few months, and to Virginia the following summer. I started in the graduate program in the UVa Department of Anthropology in the fall. I also got on the internet that year and started learning how to program. We got married in May, 1995, in Orange, Virginia.

Two years later, I got my MA. Even though I was at UVa doing Near Eastern archaeology, by masters paper was based on research in the American Southwest. That’s just the way things shook out. The paper was later rejected by an archaeology journal. The peer reviews were really offensive, one in particular; some of the old guard of Southwest archaeology were really threatened by it. Didn’t help that I’d dropped the research part of the article before submitting. I was advised to do so, but it was clearly a mistake. C’et la vie. I mostly found it humorous and typical that academics could be such dicks to a student submitting his first peer-reviewed paper.

I have a PDF of the paper I keep meaning to blog. I should do that one of these days.

I spent a summer on Cyprus excavating a medieval site and the summer of 98 with my advisor for four weeks in southeastern Turkey. Kurdistan, really. My focus was supposedly architecture and urbanization, but in truth I enjoyed creating a database app for the project much more than counting pottery sherds. I went into the Turkey trip thinking it would determine whether or not I stuck to archaeology. I’d by this time had a full-time job for about a year doing systems and integration programming for the UVa medical center. It was fun, engaging work, and although I enjoyed the academic side of graduate schools (seminars and such), the culture of academia held no interest for me at all.

So I quit the program when I got back from Turkey. In 1999 we moved back to SF. I worked for UCSF for 9 months, then went to work for Salon.com. I was there a year, then went on my own, working on an open-source content management system called Bricolage that I’d developed with my colleagues at Salon. Life was great for us in SF. We moved into a loft in 2002 and really made the best of our time in The City.

In 2003 we were visiting Portland for a weekend just after Christmas and decided to have a real estate agent show us some properties to get a feel for the place. We’d been thinking about moving to Portland since ’96, and were still thinking maybe we’d do it in a couple more years. Julie’s dad had moved to Eugene, 2 hours down the road, so that was also a factor. To our surprise, we found a house we fell in love with. So we bought it, sold the loft, and moved to Portland, arriving in April, 2004. Our daughter, Anna, was born in May 2005.

And the rest is history. I’ve done a bunch of technology-related work over the last 10 years, mostly Perl and PostgreSQL programming. These days, I do PostgreSQL consulting as an associate in PostgreSQL Experts, some Bricolage consulting via my company, Kineticode, and have recently started a new venture with a friend to develop iPad app.

Portland is a terrific place to live. We love it here. Not gritty like SF, but still with the elements of urban living. We have a house close to downtown and I get around mainly by bike. Anna is doing great; she’s so awesome. She’s in a Montessori school that we’ll likely keep her in through 8th grade.

Julie is doing well, too. At UVa she became Art Director for the University’s Capital Campaign, and started a business, Strongrrl, while in San Francisco, mainly focused on graphic design for universities and non-profits. Business has slowed in the last few years, alas, as print has been dying and budgets have become restricted. She still does a bit of work, but also has started sewing and an Etsy store (kind of empty at the moment, will be stocked in the next couple of weeks) and this year doing deep genealogical research. We both work at home, but she does the lion’s share of the domestic and child-rearing duties. After 18 years together our relationship has deepened tremendously. We’re very happy together.

Anyway, life is good. I suppose if I were to write this again tomorrow I’d focus on a bunch of other things. A lot happens in 17 years, as you no doubt know. This is just a thin slice, with more academic stuff than I usually go into, but the context seemed to warrant it.

So what’s your 411?

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The reason it has taken me so long to write this entry, after Adrian tagged me back in February, is that I was waiting for a bit of news to become public so that I could talk about it. Of course, I didn’t really have time to make it public, so that took too long, too. But it finally happened, as you’ll see in Number 5.

1. I Lived on a Kibbutz

From August 1988 until March 1989, I lived as a volunteer at Kibbutz Dafna in Galilee Elian (upper Gallilee). This was one of the most memorable experiences of my life, and I’ve actually been meaning to blog about it for a while now. I arrived at the Kibbutz with only a few bucks in my pocket, but with a note saying that I’d been accepted as a volunteer. I moved into a small room in “Death Row” with another American who’s name I’ve long since forgotten.

Within a few weeks, I’d been selected by the barman, Johnny Howarth, to be his co-barman (not what I was called, but that’s memory for you). We ran a small bar just for the volunteers and interested Kibbutzniks in a small bomb shelter just across the roads from Death Row. Yes, really. We served Goldstar beer very cheaply (The kibbutz got it wholesale and we charged slightly more just to drink for free ourselves) and really bad vodka and rum to the few who wanted it. Most of the volunteers were English or Scandinavian, with a sprinkle of Americans and other sorts thrown in (we also had 10 Thais living with us for several weeks), and nearly all of us were 18-28 year-olds who liked to drink as much as possible and get laid. I wasn’t quite the hero that Chad was in my brief time running an establishment, but, ah, what a life!

About the same time I started tending bar, I also got a larger room that for all but three months I had all to myself. For those three months, I shared it with an Aussie, Andrew Jeffreys, with whom I became very good friends. He later (1990ish) came and stayed with me at my Mom’s house in Sacramento for several months.

I spent my time on the Kibbutz driving a tractor (only one volunteer got this honor—most worked in the boot factory), mopping the dining room floor with the giant electric mop, getting drunk, and dancing the night away every Friday night at the Kibbutz disco (later named “Domino”). Great life for a 19 year-old taking a year off from college. I was even “adopted” by a Kibbutz family, visiting with their two young boys, who were very big on Michael Jordan (hi Esti!).

I finally came home in the Spring of 1989 after a short tour of Egypt and upon hearing that my mom was very ill (she’s fine now, thanks). It was a good time to go, anyway, because I rather felt that my brain was beginning to rot. There is not a lot of intellectual stimulation in a Kibbutz environment. Still, it was an amazing time for me.

2. I Used to be an Archaeologist

Before I was an über geek open-source and Web app hacker, I was an Archaeologist. The summer before I went to Dafna, I worked for six weeks at Tel Dor on the coast of Israel as a volunteer. I loved doing archaeology. So much so that when I finally returned from Israel and sobered up enough, I went back to school with a vengeance, earning my BA in Anthropology from the California State University, Sacramento. In 1994, I started the graduate program at the University of Virginia, intending to earn by Ph.D in anthropological archaeology. I participated in excavations in Israel (three more seasons at Tel Dor—I met my [now] wife, Julie, there in 1992), Cyprus, and southeastern Turkey (Kurdistan, essentially).

I really enjoyed graduate school. Reading journals and writing essays really appealed to me, and the vigor of the debate in a graduate seminar full of smart people was absolutely invigorating. I finished my three years of course work, picking up my MA after two, and continued auditing graduate seminars a fourth year, just for the hell of it (I particularly enjoyed The Anthropology of Science and the archaeological theory seminars).

But as I started casting about for a dissertation topic, I could find nothing that really appealed to me. What I really enjoyed was debate and theory (hence my nickname and the title of this blog), and counting bone fragments the size of my toenail just didn’t do it for me. I was a theorist among a gang of Michigan-trained empiricists. And I agreed with them that I needed to do something “real” on which to build my career. But frankly, the problem was that such things just did not interest me.

The summer following my fourth year, I accompanied my advisor, Pati Wattenmaker, to Kazane Höyük, outside of Sanliurfa, in southeastern Turkey. At that time, I already had a job for the University’s medical center doing integration programming in Perl, and was getting my first experience with databases (Access and SQL Server). Going into the project, I suspected that I was done with archaeology, but the fact that, after we came in from the field each day (I have always enjoyed the excavation part of archaeology), I found much more pleasure in creating an Access database for the tracking of vast quantities of data than I did in plowing through, categorizing, and entering in that data (read: counting pottery sherds).

So in the fall of 1998, I left the program ABD, and in the summer of 1999, Julie and I moved back to San Francisco.

3. Portland

Julie and I moved from San Francisco to Portland, Oregon, in 2004. Of course many of you already know that, but do you know why?

The reason is that we were looking for a change of lifestyle. We loved our SoMa loft in San Francisco, but not the neighborhood so much. There are only so many times we could tolerate coming home to find that someone had pissed on our garage door. And don’t even get me started on hypodermic needles. Julie and I wanted to start a family, and much as we loved our home and lifestyle in San Francisco, we knew it wasn’t right for bringing up a child.

In truth, we had thought about Portland since 1996, when I was still in grad school, and we even visited for a few days. When we visited again in December of 2003, we had a real estate agent show us some homes, just to get a feel for the neighborhoods and what not, with the idea of maybe moving to Portland in a few years. But she showed us a house that we fell in love with, we mad an offer, and the rest is history.

Which leads me to…

4. Anna

Just a few months after our move to Portland, Julie got pregnant, and our daughter, Anna was born on May 13, 2005. She’s nearly two now, and she’s the light of our life. What a joy this kid is! She’s smart, has a great sense of humor (yes, an 18-month-old can be funny!), and keeps us on our toes. I couldn’t be happier; we lucked out and got a real gem of a daughter. We expect to have fun with her for the rest of our lives.

5. Values of n

Here’s the big, recent change: I now spend my days as a Ruby hacker for Values of n, working with my friend Rael Dornfest building Stikkit and, more recently, i want sandy. Kineticode is still around, accepting only Bricolage support contracts—no more consulting. I remain the maintainer for Bricolage, but I’ve thrown down the gauntlet to get other people to step up an start to drive the project more.

So, Ruby, eh? And Ruby on Rails? Yes. Rael chose to use these technologies before I started working with him, and they were the right choices. And have I found the Ruby religion? Well, no, not really. There are quite a number of things I like better than in Perl, but none better than what will be in Perl 6 (someday, sigh). What I miss most from Perl are sane Unicode support, fantastic regular expression support, and lists (yes, lists—as opposed to arrays).

And what of Ruby on Rails, you ask? It seems like a fine Web application development environment. The controllers and views are nice. But I’ll say no more. You’ll have to buy me an awful lot of beer for that. I’ll take Goldstar.

I now tag:

• Rael Dornfest
• James Duncan Davidson
• Nathan Tokington
• Josh Berkus
• Ask Bjørn Hansen

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