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[CLAIRE] Welcome to Talking Postgres. I'm your host, Claire Giordano. And in this podcast, we explore the

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human side of Postgres, databases, and open source, which means why do people who work with Postgres

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do what they do and how did they get there? Thank you to the team at Microsoft for sponsoring this

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conversation about Postgres. And now it's time to introduce our guest, Bruce Momjian.

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Bruce is co-founder and core team member of the PostgreSQL Global Development Group.

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He's worked on Postgres since 1996, is employed at EDB, based in Philadelphia in the United States,

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and is probably one of the most prolific Postgres conference speakers on the planet.

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He's earned a master's degree in education and has an honorary doctorate as well.

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Welcome, Bruce.

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[BRUCE] Hello!

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[CLAIRE] So glad you're here. So glad you said yes. Today's topic is open source leadership. And the inspiration for this came from PGConf India, which happened in Bengaluru back in early March of this year, when you and I were chatting about what would make for a good podcast episode.

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And you suggested open source leadership, and we're going to dig into why in just a little bit.

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But first, I wanted to start with your origin story.

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Can you give us the story behind how you first got involved with Postgres?

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[BRUCE] Sure. I was an early user of Unix back in the early 90s.

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I actually had a home Unix server, which was at that time very rare.

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And of course, at that time, there was very little software available for it.

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So most everything you ran was open source, compiled it yourself.

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And I was a consultant in law firms at that time.

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I was using relational databases for my work, and I was always curious how the internals of those databases worked.

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So over the next few years, in the early 90s, I believe I actually tried to write two relational databases from scratch.

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Got into trouble with bootstrapping and basically gave up.

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But in 1996, I downloaded something called mSQL out of Australia at the time.

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It was kind of primitive, and it wasn't really like the relational systems I used.

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But then I downloaded Postgres, and that was much closer.

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I was very familiar with Ingres, and Postgres obviously had a similar interface.

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And Informix as well, and Postgres had similar features to Informix.

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So I was able to look at how a relational system worked.

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And I realized that this had potential, software potential, but it really lacked leadership.

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It lacked management. There was one person working on it part-time and they really weren't putting

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out regular releases. So I decided I was going to kind of help out, kind of gather some of the old

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patches and help put out a release. Marc Fournier was hugely involved at that point. I did all the

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infrastructure and kind of managed everything. So that's how I got started. And I just found out

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that as I worked with more and more people in the community, I was learning really valuable skills as an engineer.

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So I thought maybe, you know, maybe someday this the skills I'm learning will be useful.

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Not really realizing that Postgres itself would become what it is today.

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But that's how I got started. And I was a volunteer for the first four years of our three years.

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And I wrote a book and I've been working since 2000 full time on Postgres.

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[CLAIRE] What was that book?

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Remind me.

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[BRUCE] PostgreSQL: Introduction and Concepts by Addison-Wesley.

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[CLAIRE] Okay. And then is the writing of that book what prompted you to then kind of travel around the

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world and give talks and give people that introduction to Postgres? I'm remembering that

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Daniel Gustafsson was a guest on this show back in January. And he talked about how he was at a

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conference in, I think it was in Sweden. No, but it could have been in Copenhagen. And you were

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[Copenhagen, yeah.]

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giving a Postgres introduction session.

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And he just, by happenstance, ended up attending.

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And that was the moment his life changed.

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So was the book connected to this?

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[BRUCE] No, the book, what I basically realized early on was that, two things really.

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I was a good engineer in my field, but once I got on the world stage where I was working with the best people in the world, you start to look pretty small and you feel pretty small.

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So what I started to realize is that the smart move was not to work hard, but to enable other people to work.

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So, you know, if I can get 10 people to do one thing a day, I get 10 things done instead of one thing, which is what I would normally do if I was doing it myself.

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So enablement of coding, enablement, getting people excited about technology, creating a framework where people felt valued and that they felt their contribution was helping others and promoting open source.

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I saw that as a much richer goal and a more fruitful goal than sort of working myself on the technology completely.

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So I started to basically work in the early years on FAQs and making the code easy to understand and trying to help create materials so other people could get used to the Postgres code and could improve the Postgres code as easy as possible.

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One of the stories I say is that if you're working for a company, you have to work on the code.

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You don't have a choice, right?

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But with open source, you really do have a choice because they're all volunteers.

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So you have to make it as easy as possible.

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So that was, I guess, one of my primary goals.

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The other thing I realized early on, probably in 2001 or 2000, I went to a conference in San Diego.

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It was the O'Reilly Open Source Conference, OSCON.

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And I went there and I spoke to maybe 40 people and had lunch and, you know, it was nice.

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And I flew home and I told my wife, I said, I said, I don't think I'm going to do this again.

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It just really wasn't very fruitful.

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And I basically, you know, talked to a small number of people.

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When I sent an email out, you know, thousands of people will read it.

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But at this conference, it just doesn't seem like a very useful investment of time.

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But the week or two after the conference, all of a sudden our community was much more active.

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We had a much smaller community back then.

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And what I realized was that it was people I had lunch with at the conference that were now active in the community.

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And I started to understand that the personal touch of spending time with people and having lunch with them is actually a really key part of motivating.

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And email only can go so far.

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Zoom calls only go so far.

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We saw that during COVID.

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The in-person part is very important.

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And that's why that travel became pretty significant for me.

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[CLAIRE] You know leading up to the show and if we go back to our conversation at PGConf India

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you talked to me about the different types of leaders and a couple things you just said

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about enabling other people really connect to that.

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So I don't want to take away your thunder.

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Tell us more.

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Tell us more about the different types of leaders

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and what kind of leadership you think is so important

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in an open source community.

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[BRUCE] Yeah, I've always been a sort of self-taught person. Not that I can't operate in a classroom, but I was a teacher for

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five years, obviously, but I've never had any real formal

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computer science training, and I've never had any formal leadership training either, but

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I mean, I read the right books, and I listen to the right people, and after a while, you become

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good at it, and one of the, one of the leadership talks I listened to must have been 15 years ago,

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Obviously, leadership is a very complicated topic, something, again, I have no real training on.

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But I realized that I had to understand it or at least become marginally good at it.

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Because that's, in some ways, the role that I'm in.

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Or at least if I'm going to be successful and I'm going to be the best person in the role I'm in, I have to do some self-help for that.

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So I listened to a bunch of training materials. There's one or two online conferences I attend every year for leadership. And one of them had a speaker named John Maxwell, and he talked about the different types of leaders.

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And I started to understand that there are different types of leaders.

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There's this sort of Steve Jobs leader, which is very inspirational.

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There's a Jack Welch, who's my organizational.

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There's sort of Oprah, who's motivational.

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And they categorize them into different sections.

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And John Maxwell basically felt that the servant leader is the most effective.

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And you see that a lot in the hospitality industry, particularly Marriott,

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had a big sort of servant leader style.

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And particularly, it's big in industries

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where you have a lot of your staff

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interacting directly with the public

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or with customers, right?

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Like for Steve Jobs or Apple,

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their primary purpose is not serving customers,

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it's producing a product, right?

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So you don't need necessarily servant leadership

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in that case. But for a Marriott case, obviously, most of the staff is directly interacting with customers

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and they have to serve the customer. And the concept is that you can't expect your employees

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to serve the customer unless the leadership is also serving the staff. And that kind of resonated

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with me because when you're effectively operating in a nonprofit environment, a volunteer-only

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environment, which is the environment we're in, servant leader is really the only effective way

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to be a leader because you don't have any of the organizational structures like salaries,

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positions, and so forth that are normal trappings or normal mechanisms for leadership. You basically

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have the ability to serve, the ability to help the people that are working with you on this project

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to be most effective and to help them harness their strengths as best they can.

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And also in some ways to help them avoid weaknesses,

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help them to either overcome weaknesses or help them to be put in positions

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where their strengths are magnified and their weaknesses are minimized.

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So that concept made sense to me and I started to understand

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that every leader isn't different,

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every leader has a different, necessarily, set of mechanisms that they can use to be leaders.

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But probably the most effective leaders, the leaders who get the most out of the people they work with are the servant leaders who are not really interested in their own success, but interested in the success of the overall endeavor that they're in.

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And is interested in the success of the people that are working with them and not necessarily in their own success.

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I think it was Truman who said, "it's amazing what you can get done if you don't want credit for it."

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And that's certainly a servant leader style of doing things.

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And it helped to, I guess, for me, sort of separate out and to sort of highlight, identify, first what type of leader you want to be.

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And then that sort of drives how you make decisions and how you spend your time.

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[CLAIRE] You would definitely categorize yourself as a servant leader, right?

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[BRUCE] I would hope so

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[CLAIRE] Yeah, I think it's a fair depiction.

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The other thing that happened in PGConf India is you told me about a talk, which I didn't know you gave.

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I don't think I was there that year.

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And it was at FOSDEM in 2023.

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And at FOSDEM every year, the Postgres community does this really cool thing, as you know, because

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you've spoken there a bunch of times.

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We have a PGDay, a whole day, single track of Postgres talks the day before FOSDEM begins.

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And then at FOSDEM, which is in Belgium, usually late January, early February every year, big

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open source developer conference.

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There's also a PostgreSQL  devroom, which is another track of Postgres talks.

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But this talk that you gave was called Building Open Source Teams.

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And I think it was on one of the other stages or one of, was it on the main stage or one of the other devrooms at FOSDEM in 2023?

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of the other dev rooms at FOSDEM in 2023?

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[BRUCE] They basically have a lot of these devrooms, they have an open source leadership track

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and it was in that track that I spoke. Actually one of the people really

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well who used to work at OSCON as one of the organizers so I always pop over there even

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when I was there last year, I popped or this year actually I popped over to see how they're doing.

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[CLAIRE] Is that Shirley?

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[BRUCE] Shirley, yeah, to see how they're doing and just to you know catch up because I don't see them

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anymore except at FOSDEM. And I guess they just picked the... I submitted it because I do have some

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more general talks that are not database specific. And that's one of them. I have given that talk a

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couple places, but again, it's ideal for open source leaders. And again, it's sort of an open

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ended talk, where I explain what I've learned, you know, having done this for so long.

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And again, the goal is to help other leaders to be more successful.

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[CLAIRE] I really enjoyed it.

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It's about a half hour long for anyone who wants to go listen to it.

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But you cover a lot of ground in it.

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And I think you do mention servant leadership in that talk.

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So it kind of gave me a little bit more background beyond what you just spoke about.

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you covered like understanding open source motivations, and the OSCON 2003 story as well,

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[Mm-hmm.]

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right? Where you felt like it wasn't a good use of time. And then you found out that, oh,

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it was a good use of time. And that those lunchtime conversations really influenced people and,

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you know, motivated them to get involved. So my favorite bit though, is you talked about gratitude.

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I think you even went on a rant at one point.

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You're like, it does not cost you anything to show appreciation to people.

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Do you want to?

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[BRUCE] Yeah, that I remember, I do remember. That talk is kind of, it goes in different directions

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depending on who the audience is now, what what things are sort of going through my head at the

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time, but but the specific thing was that, and I guess it gets back to the idea of not taking

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credit. So if your motivation is to help people feel valued and show them that what they've done

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has made a difference and obviously show gratitude to them, that's a zero cost thing to do.

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In some ways, it's humbling for you to do it because you're highlighting someone else. And I

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think some people chafe at that or they feel like they're demeaning themselves by highlighting other

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people, but effectively it is an incredibly good motivator.

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And, you know, not only in open source leadership, but, you know, in general, in life,

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in leading your family, leading whatever you're doing, whoever you're

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working with, showing that what they have done makes a difference in appreciating that.

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Yeah,

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it's a huge thing because in a lot of everyone knows in a lot of the things you do, nobody,

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nobody cares.

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You know, you don't get a pat on the back.

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You just continue doing it and you do it and you do it because you think you have to do it.

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But if somebody comes along and shows gratitude for that, it's an incredibly big motivator because we don't get a lot of positive feedback in a lot of the work that we do.

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So, you know, I think we've done a pretty good job at that as a community.

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You know, we can always do better.

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But again, yeah, it does not cost anything just to come up to somebody and say, hey, you know, that thing you did or that email you sent.

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Or sometimes I'll just see an email that just really motivates me or gets me excited.

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And I'll just personally reply to that person.

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I'll say, hey, off list, that was an amazing email.

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I really, you really, you know, I learned some things from it.

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Or you really were able to crystallize the problem that we're talking about in a very effective way.

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Or I thank you for submitting this patch,

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or applying this patch,

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or answering this person's question

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that frankly I never would have been able to answer.

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And those type of things really do help.

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And a lot of people I think overlook the power of that.

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[CLAIRE] Well, I know from personal experience and relating to this podcast specifically, when I was at PGConf India, I met an engineer from Fujitsu who she told me that this podcast inspired her.

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And she didn't just use those words as platitudes.

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Then she specifically told me why.

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And she named particular episodes.

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And oh, my gosh, like I danced a jig when I got back to my room that night.

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[Yeah.]

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And then I went and I gave a talk in one of the local Microsoft offices in Bengaluru.

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And afterwards, I got a chat message from Rahila Syed, who is a Postgres contributor, someone who's working on the codebase itself.

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And she wanted to reiterate how she felt about this podcast.

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And it just made my day because part of why we create it, like Aaron and I spend time on this because we want to take conversations with people like you and make them available more broadly so that maybe tomorrow's future committer, tomorrow's future Postgres contributor, might be listening to the show and might get inspired by it and might be motivated to go check out the project.

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And kind of like you, you said you had lunch with a bunch of people at OSCON in 2003.

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And then you were blown away the next week when they started to work on Postgres.

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Is that, am I remembering that right?

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[BRUCE] Yeah, I don't even know if they came to my talk,

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honestly. I know I had lunch with them, but I don't remember if they were even in the audience.

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Yeah, and again, Daniel Gustafsson is an interesting case because I don't remember talking to him at

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the conference in Copenhagen at all. It was in a very unusual venue, but yeah, you just don't know.

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You don't know what thing is going to hit.

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You don't know what impact something's going to have.

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You know, a lot of times, you know, having started with Postgres and even getting some pushback in my family when I was spending so much volunteer time the first couple of years.

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You know, I tell people, you know, sometimes, you know, a day is important.

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You know, you graduate from college, you get married, you know, those are big days.

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But there are other days you make a decision and you don't really know that it's going to be a big day,

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and it is.

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So I guess the issue is that you just don't know who you're talking to or whether that the person you're talking to is going to be impacted by what you're saying or not.

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I just got back from Hong Kong last week and we had a whole bunch of conversations, unrelated to Postgres, unrelated to technology, but just life lessons, things that I've experienced and so forth.

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Then I got some feedback from some of the people said, you know,

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that really impacted me.

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It was a story about some things that I learned when I was a kid and some

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experiences I had helping somebody once. And yeah, it just,

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you just don't know. So sometimes I guess that's very similar to what happened

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when I did the FOSDEM talk. You know,

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sometimes you have some slides you get up and you just start talking from the

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heart. You don't really know what's going to happen. You don't, you know,

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you can plan some of it and you want to be prepared and so forth.

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But a lot of, a lot, I think of the success is not planning,

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is being ready to stop and talk to somebody, you know,

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just because you talk. I mean, I had a case probably 15 years ago.

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I was at conference in New York and I decided I wasn't going to attend any

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talks for, for various reasons.

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And I just kind of hung out in the lobby the whole time or the conference,

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you know, space. And what I realized that in a lot of ways, I was more effective doing that

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than sitting and listening to talks. So what I've done now when I used to do conferences,

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I attend very few talks and usually spend most of my time out in the lobby or out in the public

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spaces talking to people. And that's probably a more effective use of my time than listening to

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talks, which I'd like to listen to, but this is not about me. This is about what is going to be

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most effective.

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[CLAIRE] So for any of you who do go to a Postgres conference after you listen to this episode anytime in the next year, or two, or three, if you see a man in a bow tie

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with a big a big head of white hair that's probably Bruce Momjian. Which is not to say

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other people can't wear bow ties too, but typically you are the only person wearing a bow tie at

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Postgres conferences, so it's kind of like your signature look. Sometimes people give you

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feedback even saying "Bruce where's your bow tie? I want to take a picture of you, but you have to

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to have a bow tie on."

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[BRUCE] Yeah, I get beaten up if I don't wear it once in a while.

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[CLAIRE] Exactly. So anyway, but it's interesting that I see you, you are in the hallway a lot available to people, accessible to people. And you'll pose for selfies with people,

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you'll talk to anybody and everybody. And, and obviously, that's a very conscious choice on your

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part, right? That's part of how you're going to be a servant leader, part of how you're going to

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relationships with people in the Postgres community.

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Am I right?

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[BRUCE] Yeah, you know I had a weird case, it is funny this is bringing up memories, I had a case I was

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flying probably two years ago I was flying from Israel to Berlin between two conferences and I

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was watching Wuthering Heights, it's a movie, and it was probably the old version back done in the

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like 30s or something. And it's about a woman who has a choice between different suitors and

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can't really decide, and eventually ends up kind of destroying both of them in a way, at least that

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was my interpretation of it, and what it actually coalesced was the concept

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that this

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protagonist woman

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could not really decide what she wanted

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and therefore

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was just kind of vacillating between

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two people and it caused a great

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deal of harm

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I got off the plane in Berlin

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I called my wife I said yeah I'm really down,

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she said "why?", I was like because usually I'm pretty

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up on these things and she said

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you know I said I watched this movie and

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I realized that I'm

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you know I'm flying between these two cities

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I'm doing all this stuff and I don't

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know if I like doing that? Like, I've been doing it for so long. I know people enjoy me doing it,

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and people appreciate me doing it, but do I really enjoy doing it? And I don't know. I've actually,

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this is like maybe a problem with being a husband and father. You kind of just do things,

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and you're not really thinking, probably true of a wife as well. You just do stuff,

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And you don't even know if you like it or not.

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It's just your responsibility to do it,

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right?

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I just found that depressing because not only didn't I know, I couldn't even decide if I liked it or not.

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Traveling, doing speaking.

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A classic case, during COVID, my wife, I was obviously home.

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I'm usually traveling 90 days a year and I was home for two years or whatever.

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And she said, you know, you must miss speaking to audiences and going to con.

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And I said, you know, actually, I don't.

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I don't miss it.

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It isn't something I feel like.

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I just, I don't miss it.

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And I guess that, I guess, hit home.

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This was actually around the same time, I guess, same year that I was doing this trip.

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And I started to realize that, you know, here I hadn't been doing this thing that I had been doing for forever.

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And I did I miss it?

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And I realized I didn't, you know, so I don't really enjoy doing that.

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Do I?

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I don't know.

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I do what I need to do.

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I do what people expect me to do.

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And I do what,

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what I'm good at,

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right?

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But is that something I enjoy doing? Yeah, there's a lot of aspects I do enjoy. I came back from Hong Kong last last week and I just felt very energized. But it's hard. You know, it's a lot. It's difficult. There's a lot of uncertainty to doing this. But yeah, I think I enjoy it. But it doesn't define me.

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I would say it's not something that there are certain people who just like

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that limelight and like getting up and speaking

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and they like sort of being the guy or whatever. And I just,

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I guess that's not a motivator for me.

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I guess there's other things that motivate me to do it, but it's not,

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it's not necessarily something that, that speaks to me,

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I think in a fundamental way. That's a weird answer, but.

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[CLAIRE] One of the things that I've observed about you with myself, but I've seen it with other

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people as well, is that you do in the hallway tracks in these conferences, you do a really good

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job making whoever you're talking to feel like the most important person in the room. You really are

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paying attention to the person you're talking to in the hallway, to the person you're meeting.

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And like you said, you don't know, are they going to end up being more involved in Postgres?

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You know, are you going to end up talking to them and getting to know them even better or not?

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But you really give kind of of yourself as you get to know people in the hallway track in these conferences.

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And I think it's really generous and motivating.

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I mean, as evidenced by all the people I saw taking selfies with you at PGConf India, who were really excited to have met you.

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So I don't know.

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I want to thank you for that.

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It must be exhausting, though,

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I get it.

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You probably go back to your room and you just need to take a deep breath and kind of recover because you're giving so much to everybody else.

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[BRUCE] Yeah, there's two funny stories of that.

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One, I told EDB this because they do a blog.

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They try and do a blog every time I travel.

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And actually, if you go on my website under India, you can see the travel report.

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In that travel report, it actually mentions what I told EDB staff.

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I guess it was around lunchtime, and I was talking to somebody about,

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I think they were having actually database corruption issues, believe it or not.

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I think it was related to the SSDs not being crash safe.

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I was going through whatever details, and we were talking about a whole bunch of other stuff.

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We finished talking, and obviously I was in that lobby area in front of it.

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And I look around and the door to the conference room is open and there's no one in there.

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And I'm looking around and there's nobody.

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And I'm like, where did everyone go?

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Like, I can't figure out.

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Initially, I'm trying to think of where everyone went because the day before lunch was served

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in the place we were talking.

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So I assumed that we were going to eat.

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And I'm like, did everyone leave?

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Is the conference over?

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Like, did everyone go out to eat?

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I couldn't figure it out.

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I asked somebody.

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And they said, oh, everyone went upstairs to eat.

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And that's why there's nobody there.

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But again, I guess I was so oblivious to what was going on that I never even realized that, you know, basically everyone had sort of flown the coop.

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And, you know, oh, yeah, that was kind of a weird, you know, sort of a weird experience where I had no idea.

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But, yeah, I mean, focusing on people, you know, I was I think as a kid, I had trouble clearing my thoughts and sort of being focused on things.

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But in my 20s, I started to realize that that's a poor behavior.

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And I need to be, I need to focus not on the future, but on right now, you know, being present, as they say, is what I'm saying.

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So, you know, I think it's important to kind of focus that way.

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And the other story I was going to tell you, in terms of being tired, I will say, admit, that in the morning, I don't know how many people travel with me, but I get to bed pretty early on a conference day.

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I try to be in the hotel by 9.30-9:00, and I try to get to bed by 10:00 so I can get up at 7:00-7.30, kind of, you know, just decompress a little bit before I have to be downstairs, which usually around 8:00-8.30.

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But I will admit that when I put my hand on the hotel, my hotel room door to leave, I sort of pause sometimes because I realize as soon as I open that door, you know, I'm on.

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Right. And I might not make it down the elevator without sort of, you know, getting a chance to talk to people.

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And that's going to go until I come back to that room.

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So I have to be very disciplined about not staying out too late, not trying to do too much when I'm at these events.

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So that's typically the reason that you will not usually see me.

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I typically will not go out to eat past 8:00 or 7:30 at night.

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And I will usually leave a dinner around 9:00 or 8:30 just to get back to the room.

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And I miss stuff.

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I miss hanging out.

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I miss whatever people were talking about from 9:00 to 11:00,

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which is typically when people are out.

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But that's, I have to accept that.

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I have to accept that I'm not going to be able to go.

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And some of my trips are, you know, two, three weeks long.

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I would run out of steam very quickly if I was to stay out late every night

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and then try and do a good job the next day over and over again.

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I would be, I'd be a mess.

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[CLAIRE] You're like a cell phone.

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You need to be recharged every night.

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[BRUCE] I need to be reached, I was in Yekaterinburg, on a I guess a 20 some day trip and

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it was day 16 and I'm having dinner and somebody looks up at me and they said they said "you look

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fine," and I'm like "what, should I not look fine, is there something I should know?" They said well,

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this is day 16 for you.

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We assumed that you would kind of not be sharp anymore

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because usually when people travel that number of days,

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every day that you get a little less sleep, it catches up with you.

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I even see it at four day conferences.

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By day four, a lot of our people are not as sharp as they were on day one,

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particularly because they haven't gone to bed early

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and they haven't sort of paced themselves.

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So yeah, usually I'm pretty much the same on the last day of a trip as the first day but

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that's only because I've unfortunately had to not stay out and had to go back you know

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even if dessert hasn't been served sometimes I gotta leave, you know, and just go back and

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and be ready for the next day.

401
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[CLAIRE] I am thinking that there was a talk at FOSDEM.

402
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I think it was by Chris Travers, and it was about the importance of sleep.

403
00:34:39,080 --> 00:34:44,960
And it wasn't in the context of someone like you, who is a leader in the Postgres community,

404
00:34:45,620 --> 00:34:51,060
meeting with people at conferences, or in the case of EDB, meeting with your customers.

405
00:34:52,179 --> 00:34:56,560
It was in the context of DBAs and people who are maintaining Postgres databases.

406
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But it was really interesting, because at the end of the day, some of the research shows

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that people who do work sleep deprived, who do work that is critical to human life, like

408
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they shouldn't be doing that work sleep deprived.

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And he talked about medicine and rail operators and airlines all doing research on the importance

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of sleep.

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[BRUCE] That's funny you say that, yeah, because when I was a consultant I worked on a lot of live systems so I would

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be live moving their relational data around while the app with all the people were

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working during the day, and you know sometimes people get a little nervous and

414
00:35:38,410 --> 00:35:44,719
I'd basically tell them I said the only time I make mistakes is when I'm tired or rushed

415
00:35:46,460 --> 00:35:47,940
I said if I'm not tired or rushed

416
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your data is fine.

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Because I historically, even back then,

418
00:35:52,040 --> 00:35:53,660
knew that

419
00:35:55,160 --> 00:35:56,500
when I'm rushed

420
00:35:57,180 --> 00:35:58,000
I take shortcuts

421
00:35:58,250 --> 00:35:58,980
and when I take shortcuts

422
00:35:59,980 --> 00:36:01,480
that's when the mistakes happen

423
00:36:01,740 --> 00:36:03,840
or if I'm not well rested

424
00:36:04,220 --> 00:36:05,480
then I'm not thinking clearly

425
00:36:05,570 --> 00:36:06,840
I'm not sharp

426
00:36:07,840 --> 00:36:09,300
and that's also when mistakes happen

427
00:36:09,600 --> 00:36:12,199
so that kind of matches what you were saying.

428
00:36:13,460 --> 00:36:18,580
[CLAIRE] So let's circle back for a second to the topic for this episode today, which is open source

429
00:36:18,860 --> 00:36:24,500
leadership. We talked a bit about gratitude and how important that is, particularly when people

430
00:36:24,500 --> 00:36:30,520
are volunteering to work on a project, right? When there's choice. And I couldn't agree with

431
00:36:30,540 --> 00:36:36,680
your philosophy more in that space. And then you talked about servant leadership as the style of

432
00:36:36,840 --> 00:36:43,520
leadership that you believe is so effective and that you've chosen to adopt. Is there more that

433
00:36:43,540 --> 00:36:49,060
we should explore when it comes to leading open source teams, building open source teams?

434
00:36:51,500 --> 00:37:04,160
[BRUCE] Well, you know, I think it was Tolstoy who said all healthy families are the same, and all dysfunctional families are dysfunctional in different ways.

435
00:37:05,370 --> 00:37:09,500
And I think that applies to open source projects as well.

436
00:37:10,440 --> 00:37:22,940
So there are open source projects that I will not specifically mention that I would argue do not follow some of these guidelines.

437
00:37:23,490 --> 00:37:34,700
And it becomes sort of a dysfunctional family that either the leadership is overbearing or not encouraging new people or arbitrary or selfish.

438
00:37:35,220 --> 00:37:36,660
There's a bunch of things.

439
00:37:36,900 --> 00:37:39,900
There's so many ways leadership can go wrong.

440
00:37:41,460 --> 00:37:50,380
and I think that it's sort of like you know how do you stay on

441
00:37:50,440 --> 00:37:54,720
a tightrope, well you know you have to you have to sort of do everything right if you do one thing

442
00:37:54,830 --> 00:38:01,340
wrong you're going to fall, and that's I think one of the one of the challenges a lot of people,

443
00:38:03,120 --> 00:38:11,540
who are leading projects, you really have to be willing to, A, be humble enough to seek help

444
00:38:11,760 --> 00:38:17,860
and to get advice, and to understand where your limitations are and what things you can't

445
00:38:17,960 --> 00:38:18,740
do and can do.

446
00:38:20,760 --> 00:38:23,520
You know, we just talked about the fact I can't stay out late at night, right?

447
00:38:23,600 --> 00:38:24,260
I mean, I can't.

448
00:38:25,720 --> 00:38:27,880
There's a lot of things that I can't do.

449
00:38:29,140 --> 00:38:36,640
And there's some things that I'm doing that I'm not even sure if I like doing, but I'm doing them because I know they're important to the project.

450
00:38:36,730 --> 00:38:39,180
I know that people need, they need to be done.

451
00:38:40,460 --> 00:38:43,440
And I'm probably a good person to do that.

452
00:38:44,140 --> 00:38:45,140
I'm not sure

453
00:38:45,500 --> 00:38:46,920
I'm a natural public speaker,

454
00:38:47,110 --> 00:38:48,360
I just got good at it.

455
00:38:49,090 --> 00:38:51,320
I was a high school teacher for five years.

456
00:38:51,330 --> 00:38:58,359
That helped me to think on my feet, to speak and talk at the same time, to look at the audience as...

457
00:38:59,080 --> 00:39:05,700
to understand, to put myself in the audience's shoes because I would give the same lecture

458
00:39:05,720 --> 00:39:13,540
all the time but for that audience it was brand new, so that's what motivated me but yeah,

459
00:39:15,319 --> 00:39:22,140
I think a lot of people, my personal opinion is a lot of people want to do leadership

460
00:39:22,240 --> 00:39:23,600
the way they want to do leadership.

461
00:39:25,860 --> 00:39:27,680
And that's not good

462
00:39:27,980 --> 00:39:30,100
because what you want to do

463
00:39:30,160 --> 00:39:30,880
is you want to do leadership

464
00:39:31,040 --> 00:39:33,220
the way people need you to do leadership,

465
00:39:33,580 --> 00:39:35,060
not the way you want to do it.

466
00:39:36,320 --> 00:39:38,040
And a lot of people will sort of

467
00:39:38,480 --> 00:39:43,100
put their stick in the mud or whatever

468
00:39:43,280 --> 00:39:44,240
and say, I'm not going to move

469
00:39:44,300 --> 00:39:45,400
and I'm going to do it this way,

470
00:39:46,040 --> 00:39:47,140
whether people like it or not.

471
00:39:47,360 --> 00:39:49,780
And those are going to be unhealthy.

472
00:39:50,280 --> 00:39:57,240
Those are going to be, those projects are not going to be what they could be and what they can be.

473
00:39:57,240 --> 00:40:08,760
I think the other surprising thing that I've noticed is how much the way leadership does things permeates down to the organization.

474
00:40:09,240 --> 00:40:15,640
We have no control pretty much over anybody who does anything almost in the project.

475
00:40:15,760 --> 00:40:40,520
But if you have a servant leader examples and your leadership is interested in the project's health and not in their own reputation or success or selfish reasons, then that permeates down through the organization very well, very quickly.

476
00:40:41,260 --> 00:40:59,320
And I would argue that if you have leadership that's very selfish or very strong, you know, strong-willed or arrogant or, you know, the whole pathologies that leadership can have, those also permeate down very quickly into the organization.

477
00:40:59,540 --> 00:41:17,080
So I didn't realize, I guess, how much the style of the leaders really does go down through the organization in a way that I didn't anticipate that.

478
00:41:17,120 --> 00:41:30,760
I can understand it may be happening more in a company where everyone's being paid and therefore people have a motivation to try and fit in to the leadership that is paying them.

479
00:41:32,300 --> 00:41:33,480
But we're not paying anybody.

480
00:41:34,060 --> 00:41:37,680
So why would people do that?

481
00:41:37,680 --> 00:41:42,840
I think a lot of it is the servant leadership in a lot of ways resonates with the way people really want to be treated.

482
00:41:43,420 --> 00:41:54,760
And I think it resonates much better than other leadership styles because it is a very caring and a very considerate way of doing things.

483
00:41:54,810 --> 00:42:02,780
And that surprisingly permeates down in a manner that's much more efficient than I would have guessed.

484
00:42:05,000 --> 00:42:11,260
[CLAIRE] I know that a few other people who are also PostgreSQL major contributors, even members

485
00:42:11,330 --> 00:42:18,300
of the core team, have talked about how they've had to change their email style over time to

486
00:42:18,320 --> 00:42:25,220
bridge cultural and geographic and time zone distances between people.

487
00:42:25,750 --> 00:42:32,060
Because as you communicate with others in the community, even if you have the best of

488
00:42:32,270 --> 00:42:35,780
intentions, even if you have, you are not selfish, right?

489
00:42:35,870 --> 00:42:37,420
You share the same values.

490
00:42:37,900 --> 00:42:44,780
You're focused on the people on the team as well as the technology, right?

491
00:42:44,940 --> 00:42:51,200
The technology that we know users rely on for their businesses and for their products.

492
00:42:52,220 --> 00:42:56,860
Even with all those good intentions, there can be like misunderstandings very easily in email.

493
00:42:57,400 --> 00:43:02,000
Email is a tough medium, but it's the medium for Postgres.

494
00:43:02,060 --> 00:43:09,920
So other people have had to like really focus on how do I make sure my email comes across right,

495
00:43:10,580 --> 00:43:14,040
lands with the right almost tone of voice, right?

496
00:43:14,780 --> 00:43:19,060
Is that something you've ever had to focus on or did it always come naturally to you?

497
00:43:20,660 --> 00:43:27,560
[BRUCE] For me, I've been doing that type of email since the early 90s, so it wasn't that hard.

498
00:43:27,620 --> 00:43:41,460
I think for me, the biggest struggle is, personally, is trying not to be frustrated when somebody points out my flaws.

499
00:43:43,020 --> 00:43:55,980
So when you work on a patch for weeks and then you finally post it and then somebody, in the first hour, from Brazil finds a mistake, and then the next hour somebody else finds a mistake,

500
00:43:56,040 --> 00:44:00,180
and you just keep getting battered over and over again.

501
00:44:00,210 --> 00:44:02,900
You think you've spent a huge amount of time.

502
00:44:02,970 --> 00:44:04,660
How can there be all these mistakes?

503
00:44:05,700 --> 00:44:07,300
But you have to admit that they are.

504
00:44:07,520 --> 00:44:09,600
And your initial reaction is, no, they're not wrong.

505
00:44:10,360 --> 00:44:13,020
I mean, your initial reaction is that they're not mistakes.

506
00:44:13,150 --> 00:44:15,380
Like, that's just, you just want to think that, right?

507
00:44:16,880 --> 00:44:19,840
But A, objectively, they probably are mistakes.

508
00:44:20,140 --> 00:44:24,900
And B, those other people, even if they're not absolutely correct,

509
00:44:25,820 --> 00:44:29,920
have some level of truth to what they're saying.

510
00:44:30,390 --> 00:44:34,040
There is some value in almost every opinion that you're getting.

511
00:44:35,240 --> 00:44:38,800
So even if you decide that I'm not going to follow that person

512
00:44:38,890 --> 00:44:40,400
or I don't agree with that opinion,

513
00:44:42,360 --> 00:44:45,720
there's probably something there you can learn to improve your patch

514
00:44:45,720 --> 00:44:47,000
or to improve your slides

515
00:44:47,010 --> 00:44:49,980
or to improve the way you're handling a particular situation.

516
00:44:50,110 --> 00:44:55,740
And that is not something for me that I'm naturally good at

517
00:44:55,760 --> 00:44:59,180
Because you're just battered.

518
00:44:59,700 --> 00:45:01,120
You're trying to help this project.

519
00:45:01,510 --> 00:45:03,920
And you've worked on this thing for weeks.

520
00:45:04,010 --> 00:45:06,480
And then you just get pummeled.

521
00:45:06,610 --> 00:45:13,780
At least that's what it feels like to me when the flaws of what I'm doing are pointed out.

522
00:45:14,140 --> 00:45:22,940
But you have to step back and say that the overall health of the project and health of the patch I'm working on,

523
00:45:23,240 --> 00:45:28,600
health of the slides, or the effectiveness of the slides, it really relies on me taking that

524
00:45:29,000 --> 00:45:37,580
criticism seriously and objectively and trying to understand what I can do to make that other person

525
00:45:38,320 --> 00:45:45,300
happy or at least satisfied that they've been listened to and to try and glean any kind of

526
00:45:45,640 --> 00:45:52,020
learning I can get out of that. And that is not something that most people are going to want to do.

527
00:45:52,619 --> 00:45:54,940
I've often talked to large groups

528
00:45:54,970 --> 00:45:56,860
And I'm like there's only 5%

529
00:45:56,870 --> 00:45:58,720
Of people who really want to do open source.

530
00:45:59,080 --> 00:45:59,280
Because

531
00:46:00,900 --> 00:46:02,220
95% of people,

532
00:46:02,350 --> 00:46:04,920
they just want a paycheck and they want to go home.

533
00:46:05,920 --> 00:46:06,980
And they don't want

534
00:46:06,980 --> 00:46:08,820
to deal with other people

535
00:46:10,000 --> 00:46:11,160
criticizing what they've

536
00:46:11,190 --> 00:46:11,620
done, and

537
00:46:12,920 --> 00:46:14,240
having to pick apart

538
00:46:14,940 --> 00:46:16,420
a whole bunch of ideas and

539
00:46:16,920 --> 00:46:19,020
you just feel like you're inundated with

540
00:46:21,500 --> 00:46:22,020
criticism.

541
00:46:22,340 --> 00:46:27,500
But if you're objective, you're like, all right, that's part of doing business.

542
00:46:27,680 --> 00:46:30,800
This is how we get great software.

543
00:46:31,020 --> 00:46:34,320
This is how we get a great database.

544
00:46:34,970 --> 00:46:36,100
And I have to be part of that.

545
00:46:36,220 --> 00:46:43,080
I got to take it and not feel two inches tall, which is usually how you feel during this.

546
00:46:44,860 --> 00:46:54,900
[CLAIRE] Okay, so I just want to repeat what you just said, because I think it's important. And I don't think it was covered in your, your Building Open Source Teams talk, which I loved, the one you gave at FOSDEM a couple years ago. If I can summarize it correctly, or paraphrase you, and you tell me if I got it right, you're basically saying that it's really important to be open to feedback.

547
00:47:08,600 --> 00:47:25,640
If you want to be a good open source leader, you've got to be open to feedback about your own mistakes or oversights or whatever. You can't be Teflon, right? You can't have what everybody says just bounce right off of you. Is that, did I get it right?

548
00:47:26,360 --> 00:47:34,540
[BRUCE] Yeah, although open is a very neutral word, I would almost say you have to be ready to take a beating almost.

549
00:47:35,820 --> 00:47:46,420
That's how it feels when you're, to me, when I receive criticism on something I think I've worked on for weeks and I think I've done everything possible to do.

550
00:47:46,700 --> 00:47:48,560
And you're like, and you feel like an idiot.

551
00:47:48,920 --> 00:47:51,420
Like, oh my goodness, how could I not have seen this mistake, right?

552
00:47:53,300 --> 00:47:58,260
How could I not have realized that I'm not doing this thing the best way possible?

553
00:47:59,840 --> 00:48:07,560
But when you step back, you realize that the Postgres project, or even a single patch, is not really the product of one person.

554
00:48:07,780 --> 00:48:13,580
It's the ideas of dozens of people, effectively, all being merged together.

555
00:48:13,900 --> 00:48:14,720
And the patch author, although they may create the initial version, by the time that version is finally applied, a good patch will have the ideas of dozens of people inside.

556
00:48:27,240 --> 00:48:41,860
And that makes it much, your name still may be on it as the original author, but you have to admit that the patch would not be of the quality, the high quality it is at the end without those other people.

557
00:48:43,660 --> 00:48:47,940
[CLAIRE] You know, I've always had this concept, this idea that feedback is a gift,

558
00:48:49,859 --> 00:48:54,140
because in some organizations, and this is not true with Postgres,

559
00:48:54,570 --> 00:48:59,400
but in some organizations, people are sometimes either too busy to give feedback,

560
00:49:00,080 --> 00:49:02,280
or they don't want to offend you.

561
00:49:03,120 --> 00:49:07,840
And so they kind of, yeah, and it's not necessarily an obvious bug.

562
00:49:08,020 --> 00:49:08,720
Maybe it's a bug.

563
00:49:08,920 --> 00:49:09,620
Maybe it's not.

564
00:49:09,870 --> 00:49:13,240
The feedback kind of feels optional, even if it might be really important.

565
00:49:13,550 --> 00:49:16,200
And so they don't give it to you because they don't want to offend.

566
00:49:17,380 --> 00:49:23,880
So one tactic I've seen people use is to focus everyone on a shared goal and say, look, we

567
00:49:24,100 --> 00:49:29,080
want to find problems with this idea, with this patch, with this fix before our customers

568
00:49:29,300 --> 00:49:29,380
do.

569
00:49:29,980 --> 00:49:33,080
So please, if you see anything, say something.

570
00:49:34,800 --> 00:49:46,780
But what's cool in Postgres is people already, for the most part, those who are active in the developer community, are like really focused on making sure that next release is the best it can be.

571
00:49:47,770 --> 00:49:53,280
And so there's plenty of feedback and you do end up, I'm told, taking a beating.

572
00:49:57,220 --> 00:50:03,560
[BRUCE] Yeah, you know, you can ask for feedback in an organization, but there's so much power dynamics

573
00:50:03,880 --> 00:50:10,840
going on in terms of, you know, you're part of a development team. And if I criticize that thing,

574
00:50:11,040 --> 00:50:15,480
they're going to criticize this other thing. And what is the, is that going to, is the boss going

575
00:50:15,480 --> 00:50:22,340
to see this? And is this going to, you know, is this going to influence hiring or promotions and

576
00:50:22,360 --> 00:50:28,980
over there's just so much inefficiency trying to do this in an organization. You can ask for it but

577
00:50:29,640 --> 00:50:37,760
in the open source community basically there's no power dynamic at all, like basically anyone can

578
00:50:37,880 --> 00:50:46,180
say anything as you know, and because the open source Postgres community is very meritocratic

579
00:50:46,540 --> 00:50:52,320
in terms of listening to everyone you know anybody can criticize anybody's project or anybody's

580
00:50:52,340 --> 00:50:59,520
basically, a lot of the power problems go away.

581
00:51:00,360 --> 00:51:03,100
And it becomes really just a discussion about technology.

582
00:51:04,140 --> 00:51:06,780
So I feel bad for people and companies.

583
00:51:07,340 --> 00:51:08,900
You can try and do this.

584
00:51:09,420 --> 00:51:13,020
I know there's a bunch of different development sort of,

585
00:51:15,180 --> 00:51:21,520
or development styles that try and get this criticism concept

586
00:51:21,840 --> 00:51:27,520
within, but in most organizations that I'm familiar with, people are just so busy trying

587
00:51:27,520 --> 00:51:33,380
to get to the goal line that the type of quality issues that we deal with as a community and

588
00:51:33,760 --> 00:51:41,140
the type of continual refinement just doesn't happen. It's just too expensive or the organization

589
00:51:41,380 --> 00:51:46,580
doesn't care enough to pay enough people to do that. Or even if they could, they probably don't

590
00:51:46,600 --> 00:51:53,280
think they can effectively make it happen because you know the thing that i learned you know

591
00:51:53,640 --> 00:51:57,520
I'll write a patch and somebody from Brazil sees one thing, an hour later somebody from Germany,

592
00:51:58,120 --> 00:52:02,340
and you know I'll feel like oh my goodness I'm so bad how come these people are finding these

593
00:52:02,510 --> 00:52:08,800
problems but in fact I'll realize that they probably couldn't have written the initial patch

594
00:52:09,520 --> 00:52:16,020
but they have another skill at seeing a problem that I didn't see, so it's not necessarily that

595
00:52:16,760 --> 00:52:18,640
they are, I think

596
00:52:18,820 --> 00:52:20,780
the feeling I often have is

597
00:52:21,160 --> 00:52:23,020
they must be just better developers

598
00:52:23,170 --> 00:52:24,740
than I am because they saw

599
00:52:25,320 --> 00:52:27,080
a bug that I didn't see, but that's

600
00:52:27,160 --> 00:52:28,660
not necessarily true. They may

601
00:52:29,340 --> 00:52:30,900
be better developers than me or not,

602
00:52:31,540 --> 00:52:32,980
but they are better at

603
00:52:33,200 --> 00:52:35,260
seeing a problem. And again,

604
00:52:36,540 --> 00:52:38,920
you may have a thousand people looking

605
00:52:39,080 --> 00:52:40,780
at your patch, but it only takes

606
00:52:41,080 --> 00:52:42,680
one person to find the problem.

607
00:52:43,560 --> 00:52:45,100
So again,

608
00:52:46,440 --> 00:52:53,900
I shouldn't feel maybe as bad as I do when I've made mistakes, but it is part of the process.

609
00:52:54,080 --> 00:53:04,420
And it's possible that just organizations can't even get teams big enough to find the kind of quality issues that we do as an open source project.

610
00:53:06,860 --> 00:53:11,680
[CLAIRE] There's something that Tristan Partin said on the chat, which is that, you know, everyone

611
00:53:11,810 --> 00:53:16,720
struggles with this feeling that they don't like being wrong or imperfect.

612
00:53:18,000 --> 00:53:20,580
and I feel it too

613
00:53:20,920 --> 00:53:22,700
like you feel it

614
00:53:22,710 --> 00:53:23,880
I think a lot of people do

615
00:53:24,780 --> 00:53:26,600
no one likes having their faults

616
00:53:26,850 --> 00:53:28,140
pointed out to them, do they?

617
00:53:28,500 --> 00:53:30,320
[BRUCE] It's like your brain on a platter, basically.

618
00:53:31,300 --> 00:53:33,040
And everyone's poking little sticks at it.

619
00:53:33,540 --> 00:53:35,280
That's kind of the way I feel, right?

620
00:53:35,760 --> 00:53:36,800
[CLAIRE] Ouch, ouch,

621
00:53:36,920 --> 00:53:37,540
and yet

622
00:53:39,080 --> 00:53:40,620
with an eye on the goal

623
00:53:41,020 --> 00:53:43,239
it's kind of part of the deal.

624
00:53:43,880 --> 00:53:44,640
[BRUCE] It's got to happen.

625
00:53:45,080 --> 00:53:45,200
Yeah.

626
00:53:46,640 --> 00:53:52,580
[CLAIRE] Okay, is there another aspect, and by the way you know I want us to talk about a little bit more

627
00:53:53,020 --> 00:54:00,240
about your conference speaking talent and skill and we're going to get there in just a second,

628
00:54:00,040 --> 00:54:00,660
[Mmhmm.]

629
00:54:00,320 --> 00:54:04,380
but before we do, with regards to open source leadership, we've talked about servant leadership

630
00:54:04,590 --> 00:54:09,179
we've talked about gratitude we've talked about quote-unquote being open for feedback which you

631
00:54:09,460 --> 00:54:16,680
paraphrased as being ready to take a beating. I know in your FOSDEM talk, you also covered things

632
00:54:16,900 --> 00:54:24,060
like how to communicate, meeting people where they are, the value of in-person, the value of

633
00:54:24,170 --> 00:54:31,080
building a relationship before you have a conflict to resolve. So there's a lot to this,

634
00:54:31,520 --> 00:54:35,760
but is there another whole section that we've missed that we need to cover?

635
00:54:36,700 --> 00:54:42,200
[BRUCE] The other aspect of what you asked a little earlier in you said how do you

636
00:54:42,700 --> 00:54:48,880
communicate and those are the things that I struggle with. Now I have had the opportunity to

637
00:54:49,300 --> 00:54:55,140
to advise some of our community members in email style over the years and the problems I've

638
00:54:55,220 --> 00:54:57,920
seen, they're a little different.

639
00:54:59,280 --> 00:55:03,280
So in those cases, it's not so much the beating that bothers them,

640
00:55:05,670 --> 00:55:14,680
but just there's a sense of that when somebody disagrees with them,

641
00:55:14,790 --> 00:55:22,060
they may have grown up in an environment where somebody's challenging them

642
00:55:22,080 --> 00:55:27,520
or making them, maybe they may feel humiliated in some ways.

643
00:55:28,900 --> 00:55:31,220
And sometimes that'll come out in email,

644
00:55:31,940 --> 00:55:35,280
not necessarily as, oh my goodness, my brain's being beaten,

645
00:55:35,620 --> 00:55:41,200
but more of an emotional aspect.

646
00:55:41,620 --> 00:55:44,860
And I've tried to work with those people.

647
00:55:45,100 --> 00:55:48,460
Usually, hopefully I can talk to them in person or on the phone

648
00:55:49,480 --> 00:56:06,860
And sort of walk through why that's happening and help them understand the goal of what we're doing as a project and how the way they're handling this particular email thread is potentially hurting the project.

649
00:56:10,140 --> 00:56:24,260
What we don't want is people to emotionally go to an emotional level when they're trying to have a discussion because the person usually that they're emailing does not have any emotion at all.

650
00:56:25,740 --> 00:56:44,460
Usually they're trying to make a factual statement, but the reaction would often be one that is not necessarily feeling on a factual level, but is communicating on an emotional level.

651
00:56:44,930 --> 00:56:53,540
And that's really where you kind of get in trouble because obviously, as you said, these kind of things can be resolved pretty easily in person.

652
00:56:54,280 --> 00:56:58,840
But in email, it just doesn't come across and it gets very confusing.

653
00:56:59,080 --> 00:57:03,500
And there's a sense that people don't really understand what's going on.

654
00:57:03,540 --> 00:57:07,780
And then the email thread becomes very disjointed.

655
00:57:08,640 --> 00:57:11,520
And you're no longer progressing toward a goal anymore.

656
00:57:12,220 --> 00:57:15,740
Now it's an emotional exchange, right?

657
00:57:14,680 --> 00:57:14,760
[CLAIRE] [Yeah.]

658
00:57:16,560 --> 00:57:21,740
[BRUCE] And those cases, we really have to, as a leadership, we can ignore those.

659
00:57:23,460 --> 00:57:31,800
But effectively, and some projects do, and some projects I would argue probably have leaders who are very emotional in how they react.

660
00:57:31,850 --> 00:57:33,940
And that obviously is a big problem.

661
00:57:34,760 --> 00:57:41,220
But, you know, one of the things that we've tried to do is, you know, there's a lot of email going around.

662
00:57:41,660 --> 00:57:43,600
You know, I have a tendency to read almost all of it.

663
00:57:43,820 --> 00:57:45,460
A lot of other people do as well.

664
00:57:46,880 --> 00:57:50,040
And we're just looking for cases where people are stressed out.

665
00:57:50,300 --> 00:57:52,980
They're acting emotionally.

666
00:57:55,480 --> 00:58:00,960
They're getting stuck in behaviors or processes that are not fruitful.

667
00:58:02,160 --> 00:58:07,640
And a lot of times, obviously, we'll talk to them privately and try and walk them through

668
00:58:08,500 --> 00:58:10,160
how they could handle it differently.

669
00:58:10,360 --> 00:58:11,480
Or we may do it in public.

670
00:58:11,700 --> 00:58:18,779
We may not necessarily point out the problem, but try and re-steer the conversation back

671
00:58:18,800 --> 00:58:25,020
to one that's going to be productive and fruitful toward a goal and not something that's going to

672
00:58:25,140 --> 00:58:33,660
get mired in something that's kind of unsavory or unfortunate, not really blessing or benefiting

673
00:58:34,300 --> 00:58:40,640
the whole group. And we have very few of those, I'm happy to say, but it's not by accident.

674
00:58:40,960 --> 00:58:47,179
We do try. And I know that there's so many other people who try as well. So I know that

675
00:58:47,200 --> 00:58:51,620
a lot of times when I see something and I'll talk to somebody,

676
00:58:51,820 --> 00:58:53,000
I'll say, oh, yeah, well, I talked to them.

677
00:58:53,700 --> 00:58:56,460
And, you know, this is what's going on.

678
00:58:56,560 --> 00:58:59,620
And I think, you know, we're going to do better and so forth.

679
00:58:59,780 --> 00:59:02,020
So a lot of times showing people that you care,

680
00:59:02,300 --> 00:59:04,920
showing that you care about what they're doing,

681
00:59:05,040 --> 00:59:08,520
a lot of it is talking to people.

682
00:59:10,380 --> 00:59:12,440
You know, we talked about gratitude and

683
00:59:12,820 --> 00:59:15,839
I think a lot of people are going to interact with people

684
00:59:15,860 --> 00:59:17,260
on a very transactional basis.

685
00:59:17,600 --> 00:59:20,080
Like, okay, I'm going to spend time with you

686
00:59:20,340 --> 00:59:21,340
because I think you're going to do something

687
00:59:21,420 --> 00:59:22,200
to help me in the future.

688
00:59:23,060 --> 00:59:25,660
And I've tried to not be that way,

689
00:59:26,200 --> 00:59:28,680
that I'm trying when I'm interacting with people

690
00:59:28,880 --> 00:59:30,980
to just, I'm happy to be with you.

691
00:59:31,440 --> 00:59:34,280
Not because of what you're going to do

692
00:59:34,320 --> 00:59:36,460
or what you did for us,

693
00:59:37,220 --> 00:59:38,240
but just to be there,

694
00:59:38,420 --> 00:59:40,760
to get to know you as a person

695
00:59:41,540 --> 00:59:43,240
and to spend time with you.

696
00:59:43,860 --> 00:59:46,020
And if that translates into something good, great.

697
00:59:46,120 --> 00:59:48,140
If it doesn't, that's okay too.

698
00:59:49,500 --> 00:59:52,380
So when we're talking to people at this level,

699
00:59:53,320 --> 00:59:55,440
we're trying to do it in a caring way

700
00:59:55,780 --> 00:59:57,780
where we're basically saying,

701
00:59:58,060 --> 00:59:59,820
we're trying to help you be more,

702
01:00:00,260 --> 01:00:02,360
and a better person.

703
01:00:02,440 --> 01:00:04,880
We're trying to help you be more effective in this community.

704
01:00:05,020 --> 01:00:07,000
And we usually get a positive response,

705
01:00:07,180 --> 01:00:09,640
although I'll admit there's a handful of people

706
01:00:10,520 --> 01:00:12,040
that did not want to change.

707
01:00:13,160 --> 01:00:18,940
Just didn't. We talked to them, we talked to them,

708
01:00:19,000 --> 01:00:23,460
we talked to them, different venues in person, on email, on Zoom,

709
01:00:25,020 --> 01:00:30,660
and that person really does, they say sometimes when we talk to them

710
01:00:30,800 --> 01:00:34,360
that I think I understand what you're saying, you know,

711
01:00:34,520 --> 01:00:37,940
but the problem comes back, and then you talk again,

712
01:00:37,960 --> 01:00:42,120
the problem comes back, and after a while you have to decide.

713
01:00:44,460 --> 01:00:51,420
If that person is in leadership, then that's a serious problem because that person's style is going to permeate the organization.

714
01:00:51,590 --> 01:00:56,640
If that person is not in leadership, then there's not a whole lot we can do as a community.

715
01:00:56,900 --> 01:01:00,500
But, you know, we just have to, you know, make do.

716
01:01:00,660 --> 01:01:07,620
And I guess an extreme, I can't think of any extreme examples where we've actually seriously had to do anything.

717
01:01:07,900 --> 01:01:10,560
But that's always, I guess, a potential possibility

718
01:01:11,370 --> 01:01:15,060
if somebody was just so abusive that we couldn't.

719
01:01:15,850 --> 01:01:17,360
But we try not to get to that point

720
01:01:17,470 --> 01:01:20,020
because we're trying to do things early.

721
01:01:20,350 --> 01:01:24,680
We try and do things before there's a problem.

722
01:01:26,100 --> 01:01:32,160
[CLAIRE] So I just realized that somebody listening who isn't familiar with the mechanics of how

723
01:01:32,220 --> 01:01:36,200
people collaborate in the Postgres database project.

724
01:01:37,360 --> 01:01:40,020
The open source project is global. There are

725
01:01:40,200 --> 01:01:43,680
people working on Postgres as developers, as contributors,

726
01:01:44,080 --> 01:01:47,400
across so many countries on the planet,

727
01:01:48,400 --> 01:01:52,180
certainly across all the continents. And in any

728
01:01:52,180 --> 01:01:55,980
given release, there's several hundred contributors, usually,

729
01:01:56,140 --> 01:02:00,360
who have done something. And that's just in terms of code authorship.

730
01:02:00,600 --> 01:02:06,200
There's also all the people doing reviews, right, and helping with testing and translations of error messages.

731
01:02:06,490 --> 01:02:15,020
So anyway, global project, people with, most of the communication is in English on the project, but people obviously have different native languages.

732
01:02:15,820 --> 01:02:30,380
And so not only are there different personality styles and communication styles, people are coming from different cultural backgrounds that probably have a very fundamental DNA-like influence on how they communicate.

733
01:02:30,520 --> 01:02:35,480
And so I think that's a challenge for a global project like this

734
01:02:36,120 --> 01:02:39,760
and I should drop a link to the mailing list

735
01:02:39,800 --> 01:02:41,040
in the show notes as well,

736
01:02:41,540 --> 01:02:44,680
but it's a challenge that

737
01:02:45,400 --> 01:02:49,800
for the most part the team has found a way

738
01:02:49,940 --> 01:02:53,520
to manage, which isn't to say that it won't get even better in the future

739
01:02:56,140 --> 01:02:57,260
but it's

740
01:02:58,280 --> 01:02:59,899
tricky. People are tricky.

741
01:03:00,400 --> 01:03:02,360
Human beings are complicated.

742
01:03:03,140 --> 01:03:09,360
[BRUCE] Yeah, you know, there was a movement in the 50s to kind of make everything efficient.

743
01:03:09,480 --> 01:03:18,200
I don't even remember the name of it, but it was sort of a motion study guy who would try and figure out,

744
01:03:18,240 --> 01:03:23,260
okay, what's the most efficient setting or efficient organization structure and so forth?

745
01:03:24,180 --> 01:03:27,680
And I think it was Peter Drucker, maybe.

746
01:03:30,760 --> 01:03:36,260
And what eventually they realized was--[Taylorism.]--what's this?

747
01:03:35,040 --> 01:03:37,360
[Taylorism.]

748
01:03:37,660 --> 01:03:38,140
Taylor, yes.

749
01:03:38,420 --> 01:03:38,820
Taylorism.

750
01:03:38,930 --> 01:03:39,040
Yes.

751
01:03:39,280 --> 01:03:39,560
Thank you.

752
01:03:39,960 --> 01:03:40,540
Not Drucker.

753
01:03:40,680 --> 01:03:41,740
Drucker is another organization.

754
01:03:42,360 --> 01:03:42,780
Taylorism.

755
01:03:42,870 --> 01:03:43,000
Yeah.

756
01:03:43,540 --> 01:03:49,260
But what they really realized after decades was that you can't measure people.

757
01:03:49,390 --> 01:03:50,060
It doesn't work.

758
01:03:50,270 --> 01:03:50,420
Right?

759
01:03:50,640 --> 01:03:59,140
They're just so complicated that to think that you're going to measure, you know, there's

760
01:03:59,170 --> 01:04:00,980
things you can measure and there's things you can't measure.

761
01:04:01,620 --> 01:04:06,440
And the assumption in a lot of organizations is that something you can't measure isn't important.

762
01:04:06,630 --> 01:04:10,920
But in fact, in a lot of ways, the things you can't measure are the most important.

763
01:04:12,500 --> 01:04:13,700
So that's right.

764
01:04:13,730 --> 01:04:19,680
You can't really come at it and say, well, you know, we're going to do this or that.

765
01:04:19,920 --> 01:04:25,080
It's leadership, all these things, all human interaction is incredibly complicated.

766
01:04:25,750 --> 01:04:34,720
There is no one, you know, from psychology, there's all sorts of theories about how we process various things and how we react to different things.

767
01:04:34,750 --> 01:04:45,360
So they're all helpful, but they're all imperfect because no single theory really addresses the entire spectrum of human experience.

768
01:04:46,080 --> 01:04:48,460
And effectively, that's kind of what you have.

769
01:04:48,660 --> 01:05:08,400
Like you can read leadership books, you can read all sorts of books about how to be more effective, but they're always only giving you a small piece of a much larger pie that's fairly hard to coalesce into something that's understandable.

770
01:05:10,240 --> 01:05:18,440
[CLAIRE] So as you were talking about communication, email, tone of voice, leadership, it reminded

771
01:05:18,440 --> 01:05:25,260
me of a panel discussion at PGConf.dev last year in Vancouver, Canada, and it was called

772
01:05:25,360 --> 01:05:27,380
Making PostgreSQL Hacking More Inclusive.

773
01:05:27,960 --> 01:05:28,020
[Mmm.]

774
01:05:28,320 --> 01:05:30,700
And the people on the panel were Robert Haas,

775
01:05:30,960 --> 01:05:34,820
Melanie Plageman, Masahiko [Sawada], and Amit Langote.

776
01:05:36,660 --> 01:05:39,460
And I may have mispronounced a couple of those names.

777
01:05:39,740 --> 01:05:40,160
My apologies.

778
01:05:40,880 --> 01:05:43,140
But it was really interesting because a lot of times

779
01:05:43,300 --> 01:05:45,200
when people think about inclusivity,

780
01:05:46,040 --> 01:05:49,920
they just jump to questions of gender or questions of race

781
01:05:51,100 --> 01:05:53,040
in terms of who's included, right?

782
01:05:53,260 --> 01:05:55,240
They jumped to that type of diversity.

783
01:05:55,700 --> 01:06:03,660
But the focus of the conversation was as much on being inclusive of people from those different cultures, right?

784
01:06:04,140 --> 01:06:18,020
Who have been brought up with different communication styles that have influenced like that first 20, 30 years of their maturity and growth.

785
01:06:18,360 --> 01:06:21,620
So anyway, it was, I'm not sure if it's recorded or not.

786
01:06:21,740 --> 01:06:25,680
But I've carried that panel discussion with me.

787
01:06:27,060 --> 01:06:32,500
What's really cool, too, is another thing that came out of PGConf.dev 2024

788
01:06:33,120 --> 01:06:34,960
is there was conversations about mentorship.

789
01:06:36,060 --> 01:06:39,080
And as a result, just wanted to put a plug in here, Robert Haas

790
01:06:39,960 --> 01:06:43,580
then kicked off a new mentorship program,

791
01:06:44,300 --> 01:06:48,659
which has a couple of different layers to it for the Postgres developer community,

792
01:06:49,080 --> 01:06:51,960
and also started a Discord server for Postgres hackers mentoring, which has since evolved to be just a general Postgres Hackers Discord server where there's a lot of communication, even beyond the mentoring program happening,

793
01:07:07,280 --> 01:07:08,500
that I think is pretty cool.

794
01:07:10,020 --> 01:07:12,160
It's a little bit higher fidelity than this,

795
01:07:12,460 --> 01:07:13,000
well, I don't know,

796
01:07:13,300 --> 01:07:15,160
is it higher fidelity than the mailing list?

797
01:07:18,700 --> 01:07:20,700
[BRUCE] I missed the talk. I think I was out in the

798
01:07:20,960 --> 01:07:22,860
hallways. I usually am.

799
01:07:23,240 --> 01:07:27,800
[CLAIRE] Oh, no no no, you had to leave at like a half day early so I think you were gone

800
01:07:27,760 --> 01:07:28,780
[BRUCE] Yeah, I did because I was

801
01:07:29,000 --> 01:07:30,020
speaking in L.A.

802
01:07:30,080 --> 01:07:30,560
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

803
01:07:30,580 --> 01:07:36,360
[CLAIRE] Okay, anyway the point of that, the mentioning of the new mentoring program for Postgres

804
01:07:36,900 --> 01:07:43,819
is it started last summer so we had Robert Haas on this show, on Talking Postgres, a couple episodes

805
01:07:43,840 --> 01:07:49,520
back. And I'll drop the link to that episode here. But it's been really interesting to see

806
01:07:49,810 --> 01:07:55,200
like how this effort, and I do think this is a kind of open source leadership and deserves

807
01:07:55,530 --> 01:08:02,520
mention in our conversation today, because putting a little bit of formality around a mentoring

808
01:08:02,900 --> 01:08:08,859
program, I think is a really good thing for Postgres and for the developer community and to help get

809
01:08:08,880 --> 01:08:22,120
more people involved. So I will drop that link in there if I can find it. All right. So I promised

810
01:08:22,240 --> 01:08:28,080
we'd talk a little bit about conferences. And the reason I wanted to do that, well, first of all,

811
01:08:28,580 --> 01:08:33,519
you are also, let's talk about the conferences you're going to be giving talks at in the next

812
01:08:33,540 --> 01:08:39,259
couple of months just in case people hear you on the show and want to go listen to you as well

813
01:08:39,540 --> 01:08:42,540
in one of these other events. What do you have on your calendar?

814
01:08:43,700 --> 01:08:51,220
[BRUCE] Well, let me think, let me see what I have. Currently in May I'm scheduled to be

815
01:08:51,220 --> 01:09:00,159
in Nepal and Germany. I'm saying scheduled because I'm not sure if that might be just

816
01:09:00,859 --> 01:09:07,920
too much for me because it ends up being two days in Kathmandu and then a flight to Berlin

817
01:09:08,040 --> 01:09:10,000
and then two days in Germany and then I have to come home.

818
01:09:10,900 --> 01:09:15,940
And then my daughter's getting married the next week in Dominican Republic.

819
01:09:15,600 --> 01:09:16,640
[CLAIRE] Congratulations!

820
01:09:17,980 --> 01:09:18,620
That's exciting!

821
01:09:19,440 --> 01:09:20,920
[BRUCE] I'm going to decide the next couple of days.

822
01:09:21,180 --> 01:09:22,560
Yeah, if that's just too much.

823
01:09:23,460 --> 01:09:25,020
But right now I'm scheduled to be in Nepal.

824
01:09:25,560 --> 01:09:28,279
The Russians have been doing that.

825
01:09:28,339 --> 01:09:29,600
I think it's the third year for them.

826
01:09:29,720 --> 01:09:32,980
They've been trying to grow the Postgres community in Nepal.

827
01:09:33,500 --> 01:09:38,460
It's more of an outreach because there aren't a whole lot of developers there.

828
01:09:38,740 --> 01:09:41,920
But I think it's a great effort, and I've wanted to go for a couple years.

829
01:09:42,009 --> 01:09:43,900
And because it lined up with the Germany conference,

830
01:09:44,480 --> 01:09:46,900
the idea was I could do both of them in the same week,

831
01:09:48,140 --> 01:09:50,080
which I think is kind of cool.

832
01:09:51,660 --> 01:09:53,520
There is a...

833
01:09:53,359 --> 01:09:57,380
[CLAIRE] So PgConf Nepal, PgConf Nepal in early May.

834
01:09:56,380 --> 01:09:58,380
[BRUCE] Yeah.

835
01:09:58,090 --> 01:09:58,280
[CLAIRE] Okay.

836
01:09:58,610 --> 01:10:00,540
And then PGConf Germany.

837
01:10:01,420 --> 01:10:03,680
[BRUCE] Then PostgreSQL Conference Germany in Berlin, yeah.

838
01:10:04,510 --> 01:10:04,700
[CLAIRE] Okay.

839
01:10:05,640 --> 01:10:06,800
[BRUCE] That's May 8 and 9.

840
01:10:07,980 --> 01:10:09,600
Then I'm going to be doing POSETTE,

841
01:10:10,020 --> 01:10:12,120
and then after that, it looks like

842
01:10:13,400 --> 01:10:17,220
there is a conference in Charlotte

843
01:10:17,800 --> 01:10:18,960
called SouthEast LinuxFest,

844
01:10:19,180 --> 01:10:21,060
which I really enjoy going to.

845
01:10:21,200 --> 01:10:25,640
It's more of the old-style hacker,

846
01:10:26,860 --> 01:10:30,680
just open source, pure open source conference, which I really get a lot out of.

847
01:10:30,680 --> 01:10:33,100
So I'm planning to hopefully attend that.

848
01:10:33,740 --> 01:10:42,840
I have submitted for this PGDay Swiss, which is at the end of June.

849
01:10:44,340 --> 01:10:45,680
So I'll hopefully go to that.

850
01:10:46,620 --> 01:10:52,620
And then from then, there's nothing till Austria, which is in September.

851
01:10:53,600 --> 01:10:54,280
And then New York.

852
01:10:55,140 --> 01:10:59,260
Hopefully I'll go to the UK and PGDay Lowlands as well in September.

853
01:11:01,560 --> 01:11:02,740
[CLAIRE] Okay, you've got a full docket.

854
01:11:04,620 --> 01:11:05,900
You've got a busy calendar.

855
01:11:05,960 --> 01:11:11,200
The best, the most exciting thing on the calendar is your daughter's wedding, I think.

856
01:11:11,420 --> 01:11:12,220
That's safe to say.

857
01:11:12,400 --> 01:11:12,940
[BRUCE] There you go.

858
01:11:14,699 --> 01:11:18,560
[CLAIRE] And, yeah, that is important.

859
01:11:19,040 --> 01:11:21,180
Like, that's on a pedestal above everything else.

860
01:11:21,800 --> 01:11:26,700
But I think you are an exceptionally good conference presenter.

861
01:11:27,480 --> 01:11:31,940
And one of the things I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about,

862
01:11:32,140 --> 01:11:38,300
And I don't know if you can pinpoint the right tips to share with people, but I'm sure there

863
01:11:38,300 --> 01:11:45,440
are people listening to this episode who either have not yet given their first Postgres conference

864
01:11:45,780 --> 01:11:49,600
talk or maybe have, but want to get even better.

865
01:11:50,370 --> 01:11:54,180
And what can you tell us?

866
01:11:54,180 --> 01:11:54,940
What can you share?

867
01:11:55,220 --> 01:11:56,400
What tips do you have?

868
01:11:56,520 --> 01:11:57,280
How do you prepare?

869
01:11:57,960 --> 01:11:58,780
What's your process?

870
01:11:59,540 --> 01:12:01,320
Like, just share, please.

871
01:12:01,880 --> 01:12:02,920
Help make us all better.

872
01:12:04,100 --> 01:12:05,440
[BRUCE] There's a couple fundamental things

873
01:12:06,170 --> 01:12:09,000
as I mentioned earlier I was a high school teacher for five years so

874
01:12:10,100 --> 01:12:16,020
what I got good at was talking and thinking at the same time. Because normally,

875
01:12:17,200 --> 01:12:21,760
when you're having a conversation like we're having to now, while you're talking, I get to

876
01:12:21,940 --> 01:12:30,120
think about what I'm going to say to answer your question. And then I say a sentence or a paragraph,

877
01:12:30,230 --> 01:12:37,479
and then I have some more time to think, right? But when you're a teacher, you're speaking for

878
01:12:37,500 --> 01:12:41,940
45 minutes straight pretty much, I mean, yeah people are asking questions but in general

879
01:12:42,560 --> 01:12:50,360
you have to talk so you've got to not only be talking to talking live right but you've got to

880
01:12:50,360 --> 01:12:57,000
be thinking about the next thing you're going to say and that takes a lot of practice at least at

881
01:12:57,000 --> 01:13:06,779
least for me it did, so that sort of that, that dual ability to do that is interesting.

882
01:13:06,800 --> 01:13:09,500
It wasn't easy, but I've done it enough.

883
01:13:09,700 --> 01:13:10,800
But yeah, you do it.

884
01:13:10,800 --> 01:13:11,580
You get good at it.

885
01:13:12,460 --> 01:13:16,740
Probably the second thing is that you're giving the same lecture,

886
01:13:18,100 --> 01:13:22,220
potentially two, three, maybe four, times in a day to different classes.

887
01:13:23,560 --> 01:13:26,000
And as a teacher, you can really look at two ways.

888
01:13:26,000 --> 01:13:28,080
You can say, well, I already gave it once.

889
01:13:28,260 --> 01:13:29,060
Like, this is boring.

890
01:13:29,280 --> 01:13:30,540
I'm doing the same thing again.

891
01:13:31,840 --> 01:13:35,380
But you have to realize that the audience that's listening to you

892
01:13:35,410 --> 01:13:36,340
has never heard that.

893
01:13:36,980 --> 01:13:39,320
they've never heard you give this lecture.

894
01:13:40,030 --> 01:13:49,100
So you have to think, how, you have to put yourself in the seats of the attendees and say,

895
01:13:49,250 --> 01:13:56,220
okay, I'm thinking now of how a person sitting in that chair is going to react to what I'm saying.

896
01:13:57,500 --> 01:14:02,620
And that's what I have to focus on because it's not about me saying the right words.

897
01:14:02,720 --> 01:14:10,960
It's about the people who are listening to me, hearing the right words and getting benefit from what I'm saying.

898
01:14:12,440 --> 01:14:24,720
So I think a lot of speakers are worried more about, okay, they're so focused on what they're doing that they're not thinking that, in fact, what they're doing is not the important part.

899
01:14:25,720 --> 01:14:30,180
It's how the audience is reacting and how the audience is receiving benefit.

900
01:14:30,500 --> 01:14:32,180
That's what you're there for.

901
01:14:33,300 --> 01:14:37,820
It's not for what you're doing, it's how they're benefiting from it so

902
01:14:38,440 --> 01:14:44,840
therefore even if you ever give a lecture 40 times right the people that you're talking to

903
01:14:45,430 --> 01:14:49,900
are new and those people are the that's those people are the reason you're doing this.

904
01:14:50,660 --> 01:14:52,600
It's not for you to give a perfect presentation

905
01:14:53,740 --> 01:14:56,040
[CLAIRE] Okay. I could not agree with you more.

906
01:14:56,900 --> 01:15:02,240
And it actually, what you just said fits with the concept, I think, of servant leadership that you brought up earlier on today's call.

907
01:15:05,340 --> 01:15:22,320
So many people, when they're giving a conference talk, particularly if they're new to public speaking, it's super easy and normal, really common to get nervous, to get, you know, you have those butterflies in your stomach.

908
01:15:23,100 --> 01:15:26,540
You're nervous, which makes you stiff and awkward, maybe.

909
01:15:28,020 --> 01:15:28,660
You're uncomfortable.

910
01:15:29,740 --> 01:15:35,200
And it's all because you're caught up oftentimes in like, how are people going to judge me?

911
01:15:35,370 --> 01:15:36,460
Or how am I going to do?

912
01:15:36,550 --> 01:15:37,840
Or am I going to do a good job?

913
01:15:38,140 --> 01:15:41,080
Or, you know, am I worthy?

914
01:15:41,470 --> 01:15:41,580
Right?

915
01:15:41,740 --> 01:15:42,440
Am I an imposter?

916
01:15:42,620 --> 01:15:44,320
All this stuff that's about you.

917
01:15:45,020 --> 01:15:50,360
But the second you switch your focus to the audience and you stop caring about yourself

918
01:15:51,120 --> 01:15:54,380
and you're just like looking at those people out there and thinking, how can I help them?

919
01:15:55,300 --> 01:15:56,800
How do I explain this to them?

920
01:15:56,940 --> 01:16:00,160
How do I share with them to make their day jobs better?

921
01:16:01,440 --> 01:16:12,600
Once you put your focus on serving the audience, I feel like a lot of that self-created stress can go away.

922
01:16:15,200 --> 01:16:22,840
[BRUCE] Yeah I think the other thing I remember, as a school teacher, I remember I was put in some pretty

923
01:16:23,440 --> 01:16:32,220
high profile positions and I remember feeling that, I had I just had a dream a couple times that,

924
01:16:32,240 --> 01:16:33,700
the principal is just going to walk in,

925
01:16:34,100 --> 01:16:36,680
he's going to look at my blackboard and say, "okay, you're gone."

926
01:16:36,800 --> 01:16:38,420
Like, this is just not working, you know?

927
01:16:39,640 --> 01:17:11,740
And it used to make me feel very sort of nervous when I would go to work and so forth.

928
01:16:44,520 --> 01:16:47,860
But I had a very good relationship with the principal, actually.

929
01:16:48,720 --> 01:16:50,060
Unusually good relationship.

930
01:16:50,920 --> 01:16:58,600
And what I realized is that if I just said, I'm sorry, then the problem would go away.

931
01:16:58,740 --> 01:17:03,400
No matter what I did, if I just said I'm sorry and I'll do better, right,

932
01:17:03,980 --> 01:17:05,260
the problem would go away.

933
01:17:05,320 --> 01:17:08,000
And that sort of took the anxiety away from me a lot.

934
01:17:09,320 --> 01:17:11,340
Often, you're right, when you get up, you think,

935
01:17:11,560 --> 01:17:13,920
oh, what happens if this happens, that happens, whatever.

936
01:17:15,340 --> 01:17:19,480
And sometimes, you know, a classic case,

937
01:17:19,500 --> 01:17:23,100
your laptop reboots in the middle of your talk, right?

938
01:17:23,300 --> 01:17:25,080
Let's look at the crazy example, right?

939
01:17:27,480 --> 01:17:28,020
What do you do?

940
01:17:28,340 --> 01:17:39,320
Well, you know, you can look at it and you can say, everyone thinks I'm an idiot and I wasn't prepared and they're not going to think well of me and how did this happen or whatever.

941
01:17:41,520 --> 01:17:46,000
Or you can say, okay, everyone, laptop's rebooting.

942
01:17:46,480 --> 01:17:55,340
Let me talk about something that I wanted to mention anyway before it's rebooting and then we'll continue as soon as it's back, right?

943
01:17:57,120 --> 01:17:59,140
And that actually works well.

944
01:17:59,580 --> 01:18:08,340
I actually was speaking at a user group, a Hong Kong open source user group last week.

945
01:18:08,940 --> 01:18:11,360
And the projector kept just going off.

946
01:18:12,400 --> 01:18:15,900
I'd be in the middle of my thing and I'd just get a blank screen.

947
01:18:16,480 --> 01:18:26,040
And I remember making a joke the first time because the little logo that comes up is in Japanese, in Chinese.

948
01:18:26,520 --> 01:18:31,080
I joked that that was the word Postgres, or I don't remember what I joked, or something,

949
01:18:32,140 --> 01:18:36,220
that somehow this little logo on the thing was related to my topic.

950
01:18:36,900 --> 01:18:41,280
And I spun some weird story while the organizer kind of fixed it.

951
01:18:41,630 --> 01:18:43,520
And it was only out for maybe five seconds.

952
01:18:44,210 --> 01:18:47,600
But it happened like five times or four times when I'm talking.

953
01:18:48,140 --> 01:18:53,540
After a while, I started making jokes about the snow that was on the screen and whatever.

954
01:18:55,540 --> 01:19:07,380
But again, every time you have a challenge like that, you can either panic and get really worried or you can just make light of it and just say, well, we're going to get through this.

955
01:19:07,820 --> 01:19:14,840
And I guess that's one of the things that sort of takes the nervousness off of it.

956
01:19:15,330 --> 01:19:20,120
If you forget something or if you don't know something, I'm sorry, I don't know.

957
01:19:20,180 --> 01:19:22,340
If you'd like to email me, I'll get the answer.

958
01:19:22,430 --> 01:19:24,020
I'll get the answer after.

959
01:19:24,240 --> 01:19:28,540
Sometimes I'll pick somebody in the audience I know and I'll say, can you find the answer to that

960
01:19:28,740 --> 01:19:34,540
question for me while I continue my talk? No problem, right? The guy, the person I just talked

961
01:19:34,660 --> 01:19:40,460
to get the answer feels like I've highlighted that person in the audience and I trust them

962
01:19:40,880 --> 01:19:45,560
and the person's going to get the answer. And the fact I don't know the answer is not something that

963
01:19:45,660 --> 01:19:50,780
should reflect poorly on me. And even it does reflect poorly on me. That's okay. Like it is

964
01:19:50,800 --> 01:19:55,620
what it is right I can try and pretend it's not true but it is true. I don't know the answer.

965
01:19:57,700 --> 01:20:03,440
So I think, yeah, I guess it is sort of related to the servant leader thing. I'm not up there to

966
01:20:03,560 --> 01:20:11,720
look good I'm not up there for people to think I know everything. Yeah,

967
01:20:11,860 --> 01:20:16,380
that's not why I'm there. But then there's a lot of mechanics to it, there's a lot of mechanics

968
01:20:17,300 --> 01:20:19,580
of presenting that I've learned.

969
01:20:19,660 --> 01:20:21,540
I mean, one class example,

970
01:20:21,650 --> 01:20:23,940
I was speaking in France once

971
01:20:25,160 --> 01:20:26,500
and I was giving a talk

972
01:20:26,530 --> 01:20:28,660
that I had given several times previously.

973
01:20:29,080 --> 01:20:30,920
And so I got off the stage

974
01:20:31,090 --> 01:20:32,760
and I went to Magnus Hagander,

975
01:20:32,900 --> 01:20:34,020
who was actually at the conference.

976
01:20:34,190 --> 01:20:37,060
I said, how is that version of the talk?

977
01:20:37,320 --> 01:20:38,540
Like, was it better or worse

978
01:20:38,680 --> 01:20:40,740
than the one I gave a month ago?

979
01:20:41,740 --> 01:20:43,000
He said, you know, I was in the lobby.

980
01:20:43,160 --> 01:20:44,040
I didn't hear it.

981
01:20:44,260 --> 01:20:53,100
I'm like, listen, I need you to be in the audience so you can tell me what I did badly or well.

982
01:20:54,360 --> 01:20:57,200
I need you to be there so I can get feedback.

983
01:20:58,280 --> 01:21:02,160
So one of the things that I realized was that I was never going to know everything,

984
01:21:02,440 --> 01:21:06,420
but every time I give a talk, hopefully there's somebody in the audience I can go to,

985
01:21:07,180 --> 01:21:09,020
and I can say, how did that go?

986
01:21:09,720 --> 01:21:13,040
Are there things I did better in this talk that you liked?

987
01:21:13,140 --> 01:21:16,520
Or are there things that I did worse in this talk that I shouldn't do again?

988
01:21:18,080 --> 01:21:23,060
You have to, again, back to the problem of how complex human interaction is.

989
01:21:23,120 --> 01:21:24,040
It's going to be different.

990
01:21:25,360 --> 01:21:26,080
There's going to be things.

991
01:21:26,400 --> 01:21:28,040
Every speaker is going to have tips for you.

992
01:21:28,060 --> 01:21:30,360
Every audience member is going to have tips for you.

993
01:21:32,380 --> 01:21:40,620
If you're going to be a good speaker, then you're going to be humble enough not to seek out that feedback every time.

994
01:21:41,160 --> 01:21:44,180
There's been a couple cases where I actually had a typo on my slides.

995
01:21:45,340 --> 01:21:50,000
And I'm like, oops, I said I will have that fixed by the end of the day on my website.

996
01:21:50,880 --> 01:21:52,740
What else can I do?

997
01:21:52,360 --> 01:21:54,000
These slides are very complicated.

998
01:21:54,580 --> 01:21:57,920
I'm realizing, and I'm sorry, I made a mistake there.

999
01:21:58,920 --> 01:22:02,200
And we'll make light of it and have a joke and so forth.

1000
01:22:03,460 --> 01:22:04,160
But the... [So.] What's this?

1001
01:22:03,680 --> 01:22:04,760
[CLAIRE] Oh, I was just going to say, so asking for feedback afterwards is something that you now do.

1002
01:22:13,630 --> 01:22:16,460
[BRUCE] I guess it's back to what you said about development

1003
01:22:16,800 --> 01:22:21,320
that you try and have an environment of self-criticism

1004
01:22:21,430 --> 01:22:23,360
with a development team, right?

1005
01:22:23,570 --> 01:22:25,720
So it's kind of the same thing,

1006
01:22:25,960 --> 01:22:31,820
Although it's a little easier because I have no relationship with most of the people in the audience.

1007
01:22:32,160 --> 01:22:35,840
So they can be completely honest about what they like or didn't like.

1008
01:22:36,380 --> 01:22:44,660
In an ideal world, I see somebody who either hasn't seen the talk before, they give me feedback, or somebody who has seen the talk multiple times.

1009
01:22:45,180 --> 01:22:51,480
And they can tell me if I changed certain aspects of it, if it got better or worse because of those changes.

1010
01:22:52,480 --> 01:22:58,380
And that's usually really valuable because then I can try different styles of giving the talk, different ways of explaining things.

1011
01:22:58,980 --> 01:23:02,120
And I can get feedback to say, oh, that was successful or that wasn't successful.

1012
01:23:02,840 --> 01:23:06,000
Because, again, every time you get up to speak, you really don't know what you're going to say.

1013
01:23:06,480 --> 01:23:12,580
It's always going to be fresh because you're looking at your audience.

1014
01:23:12,680 --> 01:23:13,740
Your audience is going to be different.

1015
01:23:14,500 --> 01:23:14,920
You're going to be focused on them, and they're going to drive the way you usually present the material.

1016
01:23:21,640 --> 01:23:23,140
For example, if I'm in a non-English speaking country, I will start to speak much slower.

1017
01:23:31,400 --> 01:23:31,720
[Right.]

1018
01:23:31,880 --> 01:23:35,320
And I will use very simple words.

1019
01:23:36,380 --> 01:23:40,120
So I won't use any aphorisms or similes.

1020
01:23:40,540 --> 01:23:44,260
I'll use very simple words and I'll speak very slowly.

1021
01:23:45,280 --> 01:23:46,360
And that makes a big difference.

1022
01:23:46,620 --> 01:23:49,360
Now, it's not natural to do that.

1023
01:23:50,060 --> 01:23:51,840
So you have to be very conscious of it.

1024
01:23:52,440 --> 01:23:54,720
But when you do it, it makes a big difference.

1025
01:23:54,850 --> 01:24:00,880
I have had people come to me and they said, you know, normally I can't understand an English speaker.

1026
01:24:01,100 --> 01:24:04,040
But when you're speaking, I understand what you're saying.

1027
01:24:04,380 --> 01:24:05,540
This is actually in Russia.

1028
01:24:07,500 --> 01:24:09,960
And the funny thing is the same event.

1029
01:24:11,340 --> 01:24:15,900
I went to see an English speaker who was from the south, southern U.S.

1030
01:24:16,460 --> 01:24:19,680
And I had trouble understanding what the person was saying.

1031
01:24:20,200 --> 01:24:34,900
Because they spoke so fast and they used a lot of colloquial sayings that I wasn't even, that I knew, but I only knew because I was born here, that a normal person wouldn't know a lot of these colloquial sayings.

1032
01:24:35,600 --> 01:24:52,760
So it felt very, that talk from that speaker, it was very lively, right? It kind of flowed, it had a flow to it because he used so many of these colloquialisms.

1033
01:24:53,400 --> 01:24:56,800
And it was kind of entertaining, but I don't think it was clear.

1034
01:24:57,800 --> 01:25:03,840
And particularly it was not clear in a non-English native speaker setting.

1035
01:25:04,300 --> 01:25:09,140
It might not have even been clear in England or another English-speaking country even.

1036
01:25:09,500 --> 01:25:14,140
I don't think that person had spoken outside of the United States very often.

1037
01:25:14,140 --> 01:25:17,800
They may not have spoken very much at all to the public.

1038
01:25:17,900 --> 01:25:18,480
I don't know.

1039
01:25:19,400 --> 01:25:22,360
But I remember really, not necessarily struggling,

1040
01:25:22,600 --> 01:25:31,380
I actually found it entertaining, but I had to concentrate on what they were saying because there were so many colloquialisms in the talk.

1041
01:25:32,620 --> 01:25:38,680
[CLAIRE] Well, and accents can be a challenge to understanding different English types of accents.

1042
01:25:39,040 --> 01:25:41,420
Even within the United States, there's different accents.

1043
01:25:41,660 --> 01:25:45,680
And so that's actually one of the reasons why I'm, well, the

1044
01:25:47,040 --> 01:25:50,540
first time I heard of the curb cut effect was probably five or six years ago.

1045
01:25:51,080 --> 01:25:57,980
But I am a big fan of live captions, in conference talks, like big font on a big

1046
01:25:58,000 --> 01:26:02,760
screen up in the front because even if I don't quite understand that person's

1047
01:26:03,090 --> 01:26:06,720
accent in English I've got the captions there and I can read them

1048
01:26:06,880 --> 01:26:11,400
and of course you're talking about a whole nother level which

1049
01:26:11,480 --> 01:26:15,780
is, wait this person is using aphorisms, or colloquialisms, that might not make

1050
01:26:15,940 --> 01:26:22,820
sense too, so there's different layers of understanding I guess

1051
01:26:21,500 --> 01:26:21,540
[BRUCE] Yeah.

1052
01:26:22,400 --> 01:26:25,420
I've rarely seen conferences that have the luxury of live captions.

1053
01:26:25,550 --> 01:26:30,040
I mean, I've seen it a couple times, but I don't normally see that.

1054
01:26:30,640 --> 01:26:34,800
[CLAIRE] We did it at, or when I say we, I was on the talk selection team.

1055
01:26:34,870 --> 01:26:39,840
I wasn't one of the organizers, but PgDay SF a few years ago had the big screen.

1056
01:26:40,710 --> 01:26:45,900
I think White Coat Captioning did it for them with big font and live transcription.

1057
01:26:46,290 --> 01:26:52,220
And of course, now people are using more and more AI software to do it, but it was fantastic.

1058
01:26:52,800 --> 01:26:53,960
[BRUCE] They did it in New York.

1059
01:26:54,270 --> 01:26:56,280
New York did it once, and I thought it was pretty cool.

1060
01:26:57,080 --> 01:27:00,460
[CLAIRE] It was pretty cool, but those were smaller fonts, so hard to read if you were in the

1061
01:27:00,560 --> 01:27:01,780
middle or in the back of the room.

1062
01:27:02,260 --> 01:27:03,600
But you know, we all keep getting better.

1063
01:27:04,140 --> 01:27:06,320
Okay, so the key takeaway is ask for feedback.

1064
01:27:06,720 --> 01:27:09,780
And I am a plus one for that.

1065
01:27:10,400 --> 01:27:12,140
And also don't just ask for generic feedback.

1066
01:27:12,760 --> 01:27:17,940
Maybe sometimes I will say, you know, can you give me one thing I could have done better?

1067
01:27:18,360 --> 01:27:21,020
Because otherwise you might just get positive feedback, right?

1068
01:27:21,300 --> 01:27:25,340
They might just give you a compliment because they might be uncomfortable saying something critical.

1069
01:27:27,480 --> 01:27:33,560
[BRUCE] Yeah, the people I usually ask are pretty ready to give me critical, so they're they're happy

1070
01:27:34,140 --> 01:27:40,100
to find something wrong with me so that's usually not a problem. I think

1071
01:27:40,100 --> 01:27:47,120
another thing is discipline of writing the slides way ahead of when they're due so I will

1072
01:27:47,320 --> 01:27:52,620
usually finish the slot, I'll usually work on the slides maybe starting a month or two

1073
01:27:52,640 --> 01:28:00,680
before the event, and will finish them, probably spend a week maybe 10 days on it and I will then

1074
01:28:01,080 --> 01:28:07,420
sit on the slides for maybe a couple days where I'm just sort of like mentally

1075
01:28:09,180 --> 01:28:15,200
sort of thinking about them. I don't know why but for some reason I will write a slide deck and

1076
01:28:15,360 --> 01:28:22,600
then the next day or next two days I'll get ideas, oh this one slide is awkward or I could do

1077
01:28:22,620 --> 01:28:24,420
this other slide in a better way.

1078
01:28:25,220 --> 01:28:26,020
And it's just,

1079
01:28:26,160 --> 01:28:26,820
just come to me,

1080
01:28:26,960 --> 01:28:27,200
I guess,

1081
01:28:27,280 --> 01:28:28,520
because I've been working on the slides.

1082
01:28:30,020 --> 01:28:33,760
And then I will send the slides to

1083
01:28:34,040 --> 01:28:36,700
the Postgres IRC channel

1084
01:28:37,080 --> 01:28:37,860
for review,

1085
01:28:39,120 --> 01:28:41,280
because that's kind of a neutral environment.

1086
01:28:41,460 --> 01:28:45,920
There's obviously we have tons of people there and I will get, usually, a

1087
01:28:46,080 --> 01:28:46,900
number of corrections.

1088
01:28:48,160 --> 01:28:49,580
Maybe I've spelled a word wrong,

1089
01:28:49,920 --> 01:28:54,560
maybe I've got something a little confusing, and I'll usually get very good

1090
01:28:54,730 --> 01:28:55,540
feedback from that.

1091
01:28:56,010 --> 01:29:00,920
So if I pass that, then I'm probably done.

1092
01:29:02,080 --> 01:29:07,200
So I will be done five weeks before maybe the event.

1093
01:29:07,940 --> 01:29:11,520
I will not change those slides

1094
01:29:11,680 --> 01:29:12,840
in the week before the event,

1095
01:29:13,780 --> 01:29:18,140
because I find that by changing the slides,

1096
01:29:19,600 --> 01:29:37,100
I'm often, often by changing the slides, and I know a lot of people who work on the slides the week before, and a lot of times the night before or the morning of, I think you're actually adding more confusion to your mental model of the slides than you are improving the experience for the audience.

1097
01:29:39,520 --> 01:29:50,220
Because as you add slides the day before or you modify them, then your mental model of those slides really hasn't settled into your brain, at least for me.

1098
01:29:51,080 --> 01:29:53,540
So that would just be totally confusing to me.

1099
01:29:56,180 --> 01:29:58,620
[CLAIRE] Okay, I'm going to have a respectful no comment on that.

1100
01:29:58,800 --> 01:30:04,160
I couldn't possibly comment on modifying slides the week before or the day before.

1101
01:30:05,200 --> 01:30:05,600
Wink, wink.

1102
01:30:07,180 --> 01:30:07,440
Obviously.

1103
01:30:07,700 --> 01:30:24,440
[BRUCE] I think people feel like, you know what, when I used to write a, I'll tell you, when I was writing for college, I would often procrastinate because I thought that I'm going to get some amazing idea that's really going to make this paper be great.

1104
01:30:25,620 --> 01:30:30,140
And I would wait until the end and then I'd like, okay, I guess I didn't get an idea and then I'd write it.

1105
01:30:30,360 --> 01:30:34,180
And I'd often finish it the day before it was due and so forth.

1106
01:30:34,540 --> 01:30:48,020
And what I realized doing that is that, you know, it's very rare for an amazing idea to just pop up in your head, particularly, you know, on something you've been assigned to work on.

1107
01:30:48,740 --> 01:30:54,240
And you're better off just taking what you have, spending time on it, and then just doing your best.

1108
01:30:54,700 --> 01:30:58,820
And if you have a great idea later, then you can modify it, right?

1109
01:30:58,920 --> 01:30:59,820
Or you can change it.

1110
01:31:00,300 --> 01:31:02,180
But just get it done.

1111
01:31:03,360 --> 01:31:04,420
Let it sit in your head.

1112
01:31:05,040 --> 01:31:10,980
Get the IRC channel or somebody or some group of people to kind of eyeball it for obvious mistakes,

1113
01:31:11,760 --> 01:31:15,740
and then give the talk and don't worry about it, and there's going to be things that you don't like

1114
01:31:15,940 --> 01:31:22,320
about it, there may be a bug there may be a mistake in that slide, and you just publish, just push an

1115
01:31:22,460 --> 01:31:30,560
update for it. I mean almost in in every case, probably the first five times I give a talk I will

1116
01:31:30,580 --> 01:31:36,440
make a small modification to those slides after every time I present it. Because I thought, oh,

1117
01:31:36,580 --> 01:31:44,120
you know, this word should be bold, or I should italicize this, or, oh, there's a comment that, I

1118
01:31:44,260 --> 01:31:49,740
should add an SQL comment to this one line, so it's clear for the audience. Because somebody in the

1119
01:31:49,820 --> 01:31:54,400
audience asked, what does this line do? And I'm like, oh, I should have a comment there on the

1120
01:31:54,420 --> 01:32:02,160
slide. So again, you're always in that mode of constant improvement, but again, you're not trying

1121
01:32:02,160 --> 01:32:06,380
to get it perfect the first time. You're just trying to get something that's stable, something

1122
01:32:06,520 --> 01:32:11,080
you're going to be able to deliver confidently, something that's going to flow well, something

1123
01:32:11,130 --> 01:32:18,840
you're not going to get confused by. Because if you walk in, and those slides aren't settled in

1124
01:32:18,900 --> 01:32:23,840
your head, and you're not sort of confident about what you're doing, that's going to reflect much

1125
01:32:23,860 --> 01:32:28,120
worse than whatever little improvement you think you're going to make the night before.

1126
01:32:29,680 --> 01:32:33,960
[CLAIRE] So there's there's two things you've just said and I agree wholeheartedly with the first one

1127
01:32:34,060 --> 01:32:42,020
which is that starting earlier gives you more time for iteration, or for the talk to marinate,

1128
01:32:42,320 --> 01:32:45,120
if you will, if you want to use like a cooking analogy. [That's right.] And that iteration can be in your own

1129
01:32:47,620 --> 01:32:52,320
mind and almost in your subconscious, [Mm-hmm.] even when you're asleep, [That's right.] as well as iteration with other

1130
01:32:53,780 --> 01:33:00,300
people and your examples of sending it to the Postgres IRC channel, for example. And

1131
01:33:00,320 --> 01:33:05,920
then that feedback from other people in turn has to get iterated on in your own head. And I'm a big

1132
01:33:06,140 --> 01:33:13,220
fan of the edit cycle and all the value. Like my first drafts in comparison to my final drafts,

1133
01:33:13,560 --> 01:33:20,020
my first drafts suck, right? And they get so much better as I move through this cycle. And so I,

1134
01:33:20,560 --> 01:33:26,619
I think you're spot on on there. And the earlier you start, the more time you allow for that

1135
01:33:26,660 --> 01:33:35,040
iterative process. The part where I don't know that I agree with you is I am making edits for

1136
01:33:35,040 --> 01:33:42,380
the first time I give a talk in that week before I deliver it. And, you know, maybe because I'm

1137
01:33:42,480 --> 01:33:49,740
deadline driven, maybe my edits might seem material to me, but in fact, they aren't changing the

1138
01:33:50,100 --> 01:33:55,860
structure of it. So my brain isn't getting confused. You talked about how those last minute changes

1139
01:33:55,860 --> 01:33:58,080
could confuse your delivery.

1140
01:33:59,380 --> 01:34:00,220
For me, it works.

1141
01:34:02,680 --> 01:34:04,620
But maybe if I were to go look at it,

1142
01:34:04,760 --> 01:34:07,240
the changes I'm making that last week are not huge.

1143
01:34:07,800 --> 01:34:08,820
So maybe that's why it works.

1144
01:34:08,940 --> 01:34:09,540
I don't know.

1145
01:34:10,100 --> 01:34:13,680
[BRUCE] Why would you have ideas the last week that you wouldn't have five weeks earlier?

1146
01:34:15,380 --> 01:34:17,440
[CLAIRE] These are mysteries of my brain, Bruce.

1147
01:34:17,600 --> 01:34:18,660
I can't tell you.

1148
01:34:19,060 --> 01:34:20,060
I can't answer that.

1149
01:34:20,400 --> 01:34:33,560
[BRUCE] The way I look at it is a lot of the edits that would be made closer to the presentation are more panic edits that like, oh, I better do this or maybe I'm not ready or whatever.

1150
01:34:34,060 --> 01:34:37,240
You know, the way I look at it, you know, I'm not writing the Magna Carta here, right?

1151
01:34:37,420 --> 01:34:41,060
I mean, I'm writing a presentation about Postgres.

1152
01:34:41,700 --> 01:34:43,460
I want to get a couple key points across.

1153
01:34:44,180 --> 01:34:44,840
And that's it.

1154
01:34:45,060 --> 01:34:51,900
This is not, you know, I'm not writing some amazing thing that's going to change the world.

1155
01:34:52,060 --> 01:34:53,360
I'm just basically giving.

1156
01:34:54,420 --> 01:34:58,400
And the bottom line is that people are only going to remember two things from your talk.

1157
01:34:59,680 --> 01:34:59,780
Right?

1158
01:34:59,790 --> 01:35:01,440
And that's the other thing.

1159
01:35:01,560 --> 01:35:09,500
Like, you can think that everything that you say and every word that you say and every point you make is somehow going to have an impact,

1160
01:35:09,680 --> 01:35:14,300
but they've done studies and people pretty much only remember the first thing they say and the

1161
01:35:14,420 --> 01:35:20,700
last thing you say. So the slides are there, particularly for them to go back. My slides

1162
01:35:20,710 --> 01:35:27,560
have a tendency to be very information dense with a lot of links to external sources. So a lot of

1163
01:35:27,680 --> 01:35:34,240
people will say, I watched your talk and then I have to go back later and go on your website and

1164
01:35:34,610 --> 01:35:39,140
click on some of the stuff and really run some of the SQL to understand how it works.

1165
01:35:39,240 --> 01:35:47,820
So again it's not that you're going to really have some kind of everything's

1166
01:35:47,820 --> 01:35:54,160
going to be perfect on that slide, I think you have to almost walk in assuming that

1167
01:35:54,310 --> 01:36:00,120
your slides are never going to be perfect in a million years and all you're trying to do is just

1168
01:36:00,240 --> 01:36:07,820
get it closer and polish some of the rough edges off of it. But when you realize that you're

1169
01:36:07,840 --> 01:36:17,740
going to make a bunch of edits but in fact the problems that are going to be

1170
01:36:18,020 --> 01:36:23,540
brought up by your first and second and third audience are going to be improvements that you

1171
01:36:23,700 --> 01:36:28,240
never would have thought of in a million years and they're going to propel that presentation

1172
01:36:29,219 --> 01:36:36,140
far more than you obsessing about it would ever do. So there's been there's many times

1173
01:36:36,600 --> 01:36:39,760
where I will give a talk and I will say, if somebody will ask a question, I'm like,

1174
01:36:41,200 --> 01:36:47,740
that is an unbelievably obvious thing I should have had in the slides. And I apologize for that and I

1175
01:36:47,880 --> 01:36:55,260
will add it. So I guess it's back to humility. I can think that I'm going to keep improving it and

1176
01:36:55,460 --> 01:37:01,580
somehow find all these things that really should be in there. But it really is the process of

1177
01:37:01,600 --> 01:37:06,560
delivering it and getting questions from the audience that really take it to

1178
01:37:06,680 --> 01:37:07,260
that next level.

1179
01:37:07,400 --> 01:37:08,200
It's not me.

1180
01:37:09,230 --> 01:37:13,520
I can only take it so far and I can try maybe and add a little X,

1181
01:37:13,650 --> 01:37:13,780
Y,

1182
01:37:13,850 --> 01:37:14,380
Z to it,

1183
01:37:14,460 --> 01:37:18,300
but the people in the audience are going to take it much farther.

1184
01:37:19,060 --> 01:37:19,740
And my little,

1185
01:37:20,260 --> 01:37:23,280
my little additions are pretty much going to be

1186
01:37:23,550 --> 01:37:25,360
negligible.

1187
01:37:26,720 --> 01:37:32,340
[CLAIRE] So you are, and I think this is obvious for anyone who's been listening to every one of your words

1188
01:37:32,370 --> 01:37:39,760
in the show, but you're a fan of giving the same talk multiple times and continuing to almost

1189
01:37:40,220 --> 01:37:42,400
improve it through each of those experiences.

1190
01:37:44,860 --> 01:37:49,160
[BRUCE] Yeah, it would be pretty impossible if you're doing 30 events a year

1191
01:37:49,660 --> 01:37:54,820
and you have a very information-dense presentation,

1192
01:37:55,620 --> 01:38:02,580
right, which takes let's say two weeks to make but then you have to have the idea for the talk

1193
01:38:02,780 --> 01:38:14,340
too, right, so that would be that would be 60 weeks plus the you'd have to have 30 ideas as well in a

1194
01:38:14,500 --> 01:38:23,381
year and historically having done this for 25 years or whatever 29 years I only probably have two

1195
01:38:23,620 --> 01:38:25,100
talk ideas a year, two to three.

1196
01:38:26,180 --> 01:38:27,160
If you look at the,

1197
01:38:27,240 --> 01:38:29,020
if you look at the slot, I have

1198
01:38:29,240 --> 01:38:30,040
62 slide decks,

1199
01:38:31,360 --> 01:38:33,120
but that's over 29

1200
01:38:33,420 --> 01:38:35,120
years, and statistically it says

1201
01:38:35,140 --> 01:38:37,220
I do two a year.

1202
01:38:39,380 --> 01:38:41,020
So I know a lot of people

1203
01:38:41,280 --> 01:38:43,040
do talks for

1204
01:38:43,300 --> 01:38:45,160
specific conferences. I have done that

1205
01:38:45,160 --> 01:38:47,140
in the past for a conference

1206
01:38:47,320 --> 01:38:48,040
that I feel

1207
01:38:50,740 --> 01:38:53,360
that if I can understand

1208
01:38:53,380 --> 01:38:55,940
would be unique for that conference, I'd love to do it.

1209
01:38:56,720 --> 01:38:59,940
But in most cases, I don't even understand the audience really well.

1210
01:39:01,840 --> 01:39:09,220
So I've never figured out how to basically do a one talk per conference life.

1211
01:39:10,940 --> 01:39:16,040
And I don't know how I would effectively do that because I don't have that many ideas.

1212
01:39:16,960 --> 01:39:23,140
[CLAIRE] Well, even if you did, I actually agree with you that there's value in giving the same talk

1213
01:39:23,420 --> 01:39:28,640
multiple times. Because first of all, if you only gave it once and it wasn't video recorded,

1214
01:39:29,520 --> 01:39:34,520
then you're not getting the same ROI. You're not helping as many people, right? [Right.] Because that one

1215
01:39:35,120 --> 01:39:40,200
time you gave it, however many people were in the room, that's the limit of that influence.

1216
01:39:41,060 --> 01:39:46,260
Although maybe they might have each had a takeaway that they shared with some of their friends or teammates, right, or colleagues.

1217
01:39:47,580 --> 01:39:50,240
So maybe the influence goes beyond the people in the room.

1218
01:39:50,860 --> 01:39:55,560
But it goes way beyond the people in the room if you give it a few times, a bunch of times.

1219
01:39:55,880 --> 01:39:57,240
[BRUCE] Or if it's video recorded, right?

1220
01:39:58,120 --> 01:40:02,060
For me, one of the key things is taking questions.

1221
01:40:02,620 --> 01:40:08,420
So I find that the discussion that the talk usually engenders

1222
01:40:08,680 --> 01:40:11,400
is sometimes the most interesting part of the talk.

1223
01:40:11,620 --> 01:40:15,080
So that's what I try and focus on.

1224
01:40:15,340 --> 01:40:28,960
I try not to have, aside from the fact most of my talks seem to have an umpteen number of slides, more than I probably should have, I will take questions during my talk.

1225
01:40:29,930 --> 01:40:34,760
Either I'll break at each section or I'll just stop and ask for questions and so forth.

1226
01:40:34,860 --> 01:40:49,140
And I think that really brings a, that's really where I think the secret sauce is in terms of having the audience really feel like you've spoken with them, not necessarily talked to them.

1227
01:40:49,260 --> 01:40:56,320
Like the joke I've tried to explain people is your goal is not to tell people what you want to tell them.

1228
01:40:56,320 --> 01:40:59,540
Your goal is to tell people what they want to know.

1229
01:41:01,200 --> 01:41:03,960
[CLAIRE] Or maybe carry that a little bit further

1230
01:41:04,220 --> 01:41:05,200
from what you said earlier.

1231
01:41:05,360 --> 01:41:09,780
Your goal is to give them something that they can hear,

1232
01:41:10,400 --> 01:41:12,640
give them something that will sink in,

1233
01:41:12,680 --> 01:41:13,540
that they will take away,

1234
01:41:13,740 --> 01:41:16,580
that they will benefit from in the audience,

1235
01:41:15,700 --> 01:41:15,800
[BRUCE] [Right.]

1236
01:41:17,980 --> 01:41:19,160
[CLAIRE] which means not just talking,

1237
01:41:19,440 --> 01:41:23,040
but them hearing, digesting, and retaining something.

1238
01:41:23,880 --> 01:41:44,900
[BRUCE] Yes. And every time you're you're stopping to take questions, that's another opportunity for that information to sink in. Right. Because we're stopping and then we're starting again. So that's really a start and stop time. And then, yeah, some of the questions are just really interesting. So, you know, it gives me a chance to take a break. Right. I don't have to talk while they're talking.

1239
01:41:45,900 --> 01:41:46,660
[CLAIRE] Take a sip of water.

1240
01:41:47,180 --> 01:42:07,320
[BRUCE] Yeah, I think so. And it's usually really, really good questions. And if they're asking it, somebody else will probably have the same answer. And sometimes that's your opportunity to improve the slides. So somebody asks a question and you're like, oh, gee, I should have that on my slides. That's an important point.

1241
01:42:08,720 --> 01:42:10,200
and then you add it for the next audience

1242
01:42:10,340 --> 01:42:12,060
and then the question doesn't happen anymore.

1243
01:42:13,180 --> 01:42:14,660
But then you did another question,

1244
01:42:16,600 --> 01:42:18,720
which might be another opportunity

1245
01:42:19,160 --> 01:42:21,040
to improve the slides.

1246
01:42:23,340 --> 01:42:26,840
[CLAIRE] All right, Bruce, I think we are near the end.

1247
01:42:28,000 --> 01:42:29,540
I have one last question for you.

1248
01:42:29,480 --> 01:42:30,120
[BRUCE] Mm-hmm.

1249
01:42:30,720 --> 01:42:34,820
[CLAIRE] We have had several guests on the podcast who had interesting cheese stories.

1250
01:42:36,900 --> 01:42:43,800
Either their beginning, their origin story in Postgres came out of a cheese factory, for example, in the case of David Rowley.

1251
01:42:44,400 --> 01:42:49,020
And I'm just curious, does cheese have something to do with your work in Postgres?

1252
01:42:49,540 --> 01:42:50,280
Is there a connection?

1253
01:42:50,640 --> 01:42:53,360
[BRUCE] There is a connection, and I'll tell you what it is.

1254
01:42:53,440 --> 01:43:02,580
So I went to a conference in the Netherlands, and it must have been about 12 years ago.

1255
01:43:03,020 --> 01:43:05,460
And the speaker gift was cheese.

1256
01:43:07,139 --> 01:43:10,800
And it was all these different types of cheeses.

1257
01:43:11,080 --> 01:43:15,360
And they were all, I think they were all basically three year aged cheeses.

1258
01:43:16,080 --> 01:43:24,840
And I brought it home, and I think it must have been a PGConf.EU because it was right before Christmas, so maybe November, October.

1259
01:43:25,790 --> 01:43:30,780
And I brought the cheese back, and my wife said, oh, this is a great speaker gift.

1260
01:43:30,920 --> 01:43:31,820
Yeah, it's kind of cool.

1261
01:43:32,520 --> 01:43:33,920
And she said, we'll keep it for Christmas.

1262
01:43:35,080 --> 01:43:36,860
So obviously we had a bunch of people over for Christmas.

1263
01:43:37,580 --> 01:43:42,000
And my wife brought out the cheese, and this cheese was amazing.

1264
01:43:42,480 --> 01:43:50,360
Now, the amazing part was that it was probably four or five different types of cheese, all very much aged.

1265
01:43:51,380 --> 01:43:59,880
And I think we came to appreciate, as a family, different types of cheese much more from that experience.

1266
01:44:00,900 --> 01:44:02,660
So that is my cheese story.

1267
01:44:02,860 --> 01:44:09,760
The one criticism I have of the cheese industry is it's very hard to figure out what a cheese is by looking at it.

1268
01:44:10,400 --> 01:44:12,060
Because they're going to look the same.

1269
01:44:12,700 --> 01:44:14,880
I don't know how they can fix that.

1270
01:44:15,160 --> 01:44:18,360
But it feels like a design problem.

1271
01:44:19,260 --> 01:44:21,660
That the cheeses kind of all are yellow.

1272
01:44:22,700 --> 01:44:26,320
And it's really hard to remember what something is unless you taste it.

1273
01:44:27,120 --> 01:44:33,640
And we end up having to label a lot of cheese because you can't tell just by looking at what it is.

1274
01:44:34,460 --> 01:44:38,520
[CLAIRE] I find that if I ever to be able to answer people's questions about what kind of cheese

1275
01:44:38,620 --> 01:44:41,380
is that I have to make those little labels kind of like place cards.

1276
01:44:42,240 --> 01:44:47,020
[BRUCE] Yeah, that's what we've been doing here, that's exactly what we've been doing here. Yeah, but

1277
01:44:47,180 --> 01:44:52,780
that was a game changer for us because I think that probably the coolest thing I remember

1278
01:44:53,100 --> 01:45:00,400
was a lot of that cheese had crystals in it, kind of crunchy little crystals, because it had

1279
01:45:00,420 --> 01:45:01,700
been aged for so long.

1280
01:45:02,560 --> 01:45:04,520
And I thought that was just fantastic.

1281
01:45:04,780 --> 01:45:05,880
That there's,

1282
01:45:05,980 --> 01:45:08,880
I can still remember, and we've found other cheeses that have it,

1283
01:45:08,980 --> 01:45:11,740
but I remember going to a couple of cheese places and I'm like,

1284
01:45:12,140 --> 01:45:14,080
do you have any cheeses with like those crystals in it?

1285
01:45:14,200 --> 01:45:14,240
Oh

1286
01:45:14,340 --> 01:45:14,640
yeah,

1287
01:45:14,780 --> 01:45:15,480
this one has it.

1288
01:45:17,500 --> 01:45:23,220
[CLAIRE] All right. Well, I know that people put a lot of thought into speaker gifts at a lot of Postgres

1289
01:45:23,560 --> 01:45:30,380
conferences. And it's one way for the organizers to show gratitude to the speakers because the

1290
01:45:30,560 --> 01:45:35,920
speakers have to do a lot of work that they don't always get paid for, right? It's oftentimes that

1291
01:45:36,080 --> 01:45:41,780
work can happen on the weekends or in the evenings. And so anyway, it is a nice expression of gratitude.

1292
01:45:42,960 --> 01:45:45,300
[BRUCE] I thought so.

1293
01:45:44,260 --> 01:45:48,420
[CLAIRE] Okay, well, speaking of gratitude, thank you for joining me.

1294
01:45:48,800 --> 01:45:51,320
I know you're not a podcast person per se.

1295
01:45:51,900 --> 01:45:55,300
You told me that you don't regularly listen to a lot of podcasts,

1296
01:45:56,060 --> 01:46:00,180
but I appreciate you coming and sharing your perspective on leadership in open source

1297
01:46:00,610 --> 01:46:03,660
and as well on conference speaking with all of us.

1298
01:46:05,300 --> 01:46:06,080
So thank you, Bruce.

1299
01:46:07,440 --> 01:46:07,760
[BRUCE] Well thank you for inviting me.

1300
01:46:09,260 --> 01:46:12,060
[CLAIRE] And for those of you listening, if you liked today's episode

1301
01:46:12,100 --> 01:46:14,640
and you want to hear more of these Talking Postgres episodes,

1302
01:46:15,140 --> 01:46:18,600
you should subscribe on Apple, or Spotify, or YouTube,

1303
01:46:18,800 --> 01:46:20,620
or wherever you get your podcasts.

1304
01:46:21,080 --> 01:46:22,360
And please tell your friends too.

1305
01:46:23,020 --> 01:46:24,280
If you leave a review,

1306
01:46:25,060 --> 01:46:27,420
that helps more people discover the podcast.

1307
01:46:27,900 --> 01:46:29,940
You can always get to past episodes,

1308
01:46:30,300 --> 01:46:32,960
get links to subscribe on the different platforms

1309
01:46:34,080 --> 01:46:35,940
at TalkingPostgres.com.

1310
01:46:36,560 --> 01:46:39,360
And you can find transcripts on all the episode pages

1311
01:46:39,460 --> 01:46:40,960
on TalkingPostgres.com too.

1312
01:46:41,780 --> 01:46:46,240
A big thank you also to everyone who joined this live recording

1313
01:46:46,860 --> 01:46:49,620
and participated in the live text chat on Discord.

1314
01:46:51,300 --> 01:47:48,560
Thank you.