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[CLAIRE] Welcome to Talking Postgres, a monthly podcast for developers who love this database.

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I'm your host, Claire Giordano, and in this podcast, we will explore the human side of Postgres

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databases and open source. And which means why do people who work with Postgres do what they do

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and how did they get there? I want to say thank you to the team at Microsoft for sponsoring today's

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community conversation. Now, today's guest is Jeremy Schneider. Jeremy is a Postgres database

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engineer. He currently works at GEICO, where he's helping to build a next-generation hybrid cloud

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database platform. And he formerly worked with Postgres at AWS. And before that, he spent about

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15 years working with Oracle databases. Jeremy is a blogger, and he's co-organizer of the Seattle

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Postgres user group. He's author of a super useful poster that I'm sure we'll talk about

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called the Postgres Happiness Hints. And that's it. Welcome, Jeremy. [Thank you.]

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All right. So today's topic is how I got started running a Postgres user group. And so we're

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definitely going to spend a big chunk of time talking about local user groups in the Postgres

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community. But first, if you don't mind, I wanted to start with your origin story as a developer.

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And once we know how you became a developer, then of course, I'm going to ask you,

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how did you get started with databases? But let's start at the basic level.

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First line of code.

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[JEREMY] All right. Well, I feel like we're breaking the rules a little bit because the name of the podcast

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is Talking Postgres, but my developer origin goes way back. My parents are actually visiting town.

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[CLAIRE] Before Postgres.

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[JEREMY] It does. We'll get to Postgres eventually, but if you want to know where it all started,

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I actually, it's funny, actually, since my parents were visiting, I asked my dad this

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morning to remind me.

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And my first line of code was all the way back when I was in high school.

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And it was because our neighbor, who was two houses down the street in rural Michigan, a

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guy named Scott Way, offered me a job while I was in high school.

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Let's see, he worked, had a small business in the automotive industry, and was willing

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to kind of hire me as a high schooler to do some programming because it was started out as a

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great summer job and that was kind of where it all started for me. I'm trying

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to even remember. I remember doing Visual Basic stuff. I remember writing part programs for

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CNCs, which were, if I remember right, computers attached to machining equipment.

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It's a long time ago.

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[CLAIRE] What's part programming?

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[JEREMY] So ages, ages ago.

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Oh, man.

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It's actually a lot like 3D printers today.

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But before we had 3D printers, when you were just like large scale industrial stuff. And I was like, I wrote this little program that would just upload the part programs.

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[CLAIRE] Okay. All right. So, okay, but not every high school student can land a summer job as a developer. So does that mean you'd been playing around with programming and code in school or just at home?

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[JEREMY] Yep, for sure.

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Yep, there were, you know, the computer classes at school and stuff.

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And I don't know.

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I mean, it's funny.

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Who knows?

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I was, you know, I was probably not writing, amazing programs.

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Yeah, I mean, this was a summer job as a high schooler.

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But it was the on-ramp. [Right, right, right.]

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It was what started things out.

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[CLAIRE] And then did you study, did you go to university?

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Did you study more computer science at school?

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Or how did you go further than this summer job?

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Or did you walk away the summer job?

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Maybe you hated it and you didn't do anything with code for another five years.

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[JEREMY] I, let's see here.

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I, you know, I always was interested in a bunch of things.

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So computers were always there along with a bunch of other things as well.

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So I did end up going to a university right out of high school.

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And I changed my major literally every semester for the first two years I was there because I couldn't make up my mind.

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I think I was an English major for a while.

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I was a computer science major for one of those semesters.

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And then at the end of two years, I ended up actually, I wouldn't say dropping out, but

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deciding not to continue.

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Ended up going back home, getting a job as a dishwasher at a restaurant.

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But I don't know.

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I was just doing all kinds of stuff.

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I did end up getting a job after eventually, after kind of coming back home with this, a

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company called the ASU Group, I remember, who funny, full circle, was in the insurance

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industry, doing another kind of programming job. And this is actually a fun part. So I had

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come back home, I got this programming job. And I remember working at this company in Okemos,

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Michigan. I still know exactly where the building is when I've gone back home.

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And they had, there's a bunch of fun things I did there. But they had literally this closet with a

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server sitting in the closet that I think a contractor had put together for this application.

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And on this server sitting in a closet, there was an Oracle database and nobody knew anything

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about this database at all.

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And I was just, you know, I was very curious, very interested in trying to figure things out.

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And that was just really, I was curious.

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I was, I wanted to try to figure this thing out and it was an opportunity to try to figure

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things out.

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And one of the things that I remember doing, this is probably my early twenties or so.

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So at one point, I figured out that the Oracle manuals, you could download them over the internet.

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And this is, let me think, time frame.

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This would be like early 2000s, right?

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So 2000, 2001, 2002.

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And I found where you could download.

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And my favorite one was Oracle had a manual called the Concepts Manual.

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And I figured out how to download that Concepts Manual.

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And I just remember for about two weeks straight, every night, there was this little coffee shop

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locally in town. It was this local Michigan chain. Originally was called Beaners. Later,

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they renamed it to Biggby. And I just go in the evenings and sit there. And I don't know what

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people thought, but I was sitting there with my laptop, just reading these PDFs. And I just was

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having a great time. The stuff that I was reading about the concepts of the Oracle database,

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and the concepts made it kind of walk through, how does the redo log work, just basic stuff,

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backup and recovery. I just thought it was the coolest stuff I'd ever read.

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And so I'm sitting here just kind of in the evenings because I figured out how to download the

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manuals for Oracle, reading through, you know, get some coffee or something and sit there and read

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through these PDFs. And that was, that was what probably first got me interested in databases in

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general, which I still think today is a super cool field to be involved in.

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[CLAIRE] Well, and it's the field you've been involved in ever since.

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Is that right?

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[JEREMY] Yeah, yeah, it is.

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I got, you know, that job eventually, I mean, you know, I was curious and so eventually

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kind of, you know, I mean, nobody else, I kind of became the guy who took care of that

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one database, right?

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That Oracle database.

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Eventually several years later, I decided, you know, I'm in like my mid twenties.

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I'm in kind of this is the Lansing, Michigan area.

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I decided I wanted to try out living in a bigger city.

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So I put everything I owned in the back of my truck and drove to Chicago, found an apartment

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there.

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And I found that time I was able to kind of pivot this.

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And when I was looking for jobs in Chicago, I was actually able to find a job with

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Oracle in the name.

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So that was, you know, I was having enough fun with it that I decided I wanted to look

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for a job where I could spend even more time digging into this really interesting area called

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databases.

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[CLAIRE] Got it. Okay. And then you're right. The name of the podcast is Talking Postgres. So we're

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probably not going to spend the next 20 minutes talking about Oracle. But it is interesting that

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you said that was early 2000s.

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Is that right?

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Ish.

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You continue to work with Oracle databases until about 2017 based on my research. [That's right.]

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And then you moved over into Postgres.

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[JEREMY] That's right.

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Yep.

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[CLAIRE] So I'm assuming by that point, you've been working with Oracle for more than a decade.

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You were probably very skilled, very expert, had solved a lot of different kinds of problems.

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Let's just take that as fact.

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Okay, maybe you could nod or agree or something.

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[JEREMY] Sure.

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Sure.

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I mean,

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I don't, the word expert's a fun word.

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I think that, yeah, I had lots of experiences and I learned a lot of things.

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I don't know, but I'll just sort of side comment.

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The more that you learn about databases, I think the more you realize that you don't

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know.

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[CLAIRE] Okay. So 2017 though, you transitioned into a job where the main focus was going to be Postgres.

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So why did you make that transition? Was it because of the database or was it just because

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of the job or the city or the location? And then what was that transition like? Was it easy? Was it

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hard? Tell me about it.

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[JEREMY] The 2017, yeah, so 2017, I took a new job.

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And the fact that the job was related to Postgres was almost an accident, I would say.

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It wasn't on purpose at that time.

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I was, we'll connect back into this later, because I think that the whole user group side

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of the story, which we'll get to a little bit later, really starts a lot earlier than

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this. And there's a reason that it kind of naturally connected in. Actually, no, I'm

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going to kind of go back a little bit and touch on that now, because I think this is a

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really interesting part of the story. So all the way back when I was just getting started,

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user groups were part of the story for me. Even when I was living in Lansing,

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Michigan in the early 2000s, there was just some guys who were kind of hobbyists with Linux,

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who had a thing called the Greater Lansing Linux User Group. And I stumbled across this. And I

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remember going to a couple of those meetups, and they were never real big. It was a couple people

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meeting up at a coffee shop in Lansing. But it made an impression on me very early on.

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And then also another sort of important thing, it's not directly user groups, but even in the early

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2000s, in addition to discovering that I could download the Oracle concepts manual from the

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internet, I also was finding user communities on the internet. And I remember there was a mailing

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list called the Oracle-L mailing list, which had lots of activity, lots of helpful people.

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There were people in the Oracle community who were starting up websites, a guy named Tim

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Hall, Tom Kyte, everybody knows Tom Kyte, but this was early Oracle days. And he wasn't employed by

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Oracle at the time doing this, it was just a whole bunch of people were using the internet,

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which really changed so many things, right? It became a way for people to directly connect with

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each other. And, you know, sort of another thing that I think is just worth mentioning,

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that had a big influence on me, was something called the Oak Table Network. I'm curious if

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anybody's ever mentioned this on any of your podcasts before. Have you ever heard of this?

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[CLAIRE] No, I have not.

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[JEREMY] Oh, gosh. The Oak Table Network is a super fun bit of lore. I've heard it described as a drinking

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club with a database problem. If you've heard people make jokes like that before, it was a little

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bit social, but any time, any opportunity I ever had to just sort of hang out with sort of people in

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this sort of network, universally anytime. I always heard just some of the most fascinating,

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deeply technical discussions just randomly happening.

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You know, you just, you couldn't get together with a few people who are part of

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the Oak Table Network without them talking about, I don't know, disk I/O or indexes.

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So they just, they just talk about crazy, interesting technical things.

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[CLAIRE] Okay, but...

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Pause for a second.

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Oak Table Network, is that an in-person user group kind of thing, or is it online digital

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mailing list or bulletin board or something like that?

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[JEREMY] It's a little bit of both.

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It, it's a little bit, and it, it wasn't, I don't know that it was a formally, I don't

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how formally structured there were kind of, it was a network of people and there were some kind

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of structures. The reason it's called the oak table network is because there was a literal oak

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table, I believe at Mogens' house, maybe in Denmark. I was not involved that early on. This is sort of

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probably one generation before me. But I was sort of, they were also very welcoming and open. There

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was a bunch of people who were sort of invited in just to get to know people.

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And so it was, it was both, it was very global.

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There were people from all over the world kind of associated with this thing.

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And so, you know, they weren't,

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it wasn't as though people were meeting every Thursday night or once a month,

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you know, downtown Chicago or something,

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but there were certainly lots of in-person meetups.

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And one of my first in-person interactions was that there,

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there were a bunch of people in Ann Arbor, Michigan,

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and around the sort of the greater Detroit area, excuse me, who,

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who were involved. And they decided at one point to do a sort of a little mini conference in

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in Michigan. And this is when I was very early in my career. And I was like, well, this

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sounds amazing. A bunch of, you know, people whose blogs I had seen online, you know, I remember

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some guys like, for example, Kevin Closson was writing these blogs about he came up with Oracle

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benchmarking stuff, but it was all just published on the internet. It wasn't like official from Oracle

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or something. And I'm like, there's all these people I can just come here and talk right in

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my own state. How can I get into this conference? I'm also in my twenties and I'm not like,

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you know, independently wealthy or anything. So I was like, I have an idea. I will just email these

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people and tell them that, I will volunteer to be your official photographer. If you'll,

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let me come to the conference or do whatever else you want. And so I got myself a free ticket by,

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by offering to like, just take some pictures. I borrowed my brother's camera because he had a nice

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SLR camera so I could take pictures of people and then I helped them out with making some

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signage.

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And so in exchange for that, I got to go to this thing for free.

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And I was just like, you know, I was like, this is amazing.

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All you know, sort of all these people who seemed legendary to me at the time.

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And I could just kind of be at the same hotel and go to a couple of the talks and listen

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to them.

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One of the people who was there, by the way, was a guy named Jeremiah Wilton, who had done

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a bunch of talking.

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I remember about Oracle Data Guard, super smart guy.

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And this is where it circles back because it's 2016, 2017 timeframe, and I'm having loads

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of fun.

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I still love Oracle to this day.

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It's, I think, some of the best engineering you'll see anywhere in the world.

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It's really fun to work on.

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But I was also around 2016, 2017 thinking, this is a lot of fun working with Oracle, but

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it's a big world out there.

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There's lots of other things I could also complement this skill set with.

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And I was kind of thinking I want to broaden out, right?

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So I wasn't necessarily specifically looking for Postgres, but I interviewed for some DevOps

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jobs.

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I remember I interviewed at Confluent.

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I interviewed at the Hadoop company, one of the Hadoop companies.

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I was pretty open, right?

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And Jeremiah Wilton, who was one of these folks that I knew through sort of just professional

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networking, looking for places to hang out.

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I'd met him in person at this conference and through the Oak Table network.

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I was pinging a bunch of people and just, he happened to reply and send me a very specific

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listing.

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I had been looking at stuff in Chicago and he was like, Hey, what you should apply for

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this job.

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And it was a job that was based in Seattle rather than being based in Chicago.

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So kind of long story short, I put that application in and that ended up working out and that was

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what brought me to Chicago.

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And it turned out that ended up being a Postgres job.

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[CLAIRE] Wait, brought you to Chicago, brought you to Seattle.

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Sorry, Seattle.

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[JEREMY] Yes.

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Brought me to Seattle.

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Yes.

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[CLAIRE] Okay, got it.

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And it was a Postgres job.

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And this was your RDS Postgres job.

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Is that right?

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[JEREMY] Yes.

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And I didn't know it at the time.

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It turned out that this was a job working with Aurora Postgres and, and it was, it was

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just a very sort of lucky opportunity because I was, it was before that, that went, it was

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before Aurora Postgres went GA.

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So that Aurora Postgres went GA in the, yeah, in the fall of 2017. [Early days.]

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And I joined the team in the summer of 2017.

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So they actually didn't tell me in the interview.

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I don't think they could because it wasn't public yet. [Right, right, right.]

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But it turned out that I was joining a team where I was sort of doing a little bit of both

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because there's a lot of overlap, right?

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So it just made sense.

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I was working with both RDS Postgres, but I also joined the team that was part of launching

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Aurora Postgres too.

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[CLAIRE] Got it. Okay. And then back to the conference for a second, the one where you borrowed your

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brother's camera and volunteered to be a photographer in order to get the pass. Do you

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happen to remember the name of that conference? Was it called an Oak Table Conference or had some

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other name just for the show notes. Yeah. What was it? MOTS. Okay. Got it.

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[JEREMY] Oh, I remember.

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It was called the Michigan Oak Table Symposium, or MOTS.

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And fun little bit of trivia.

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If you go to the YouTube page for the Seattle Postgres user group, at the very, very bottom

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of that page, just because I had nowhere else to stick this, I actually stuck a video recording

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of a hilarious sketch that Cary Millsap and Mogens Nørgaard did that I recorded with my brother's

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camera at this Oak Table Symposium conference. You have to scroll way to the bottom, but it's

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actually posted up there. The audio quality is terrible, but they were taking this old Johnny

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Carson sketch and they turned it into this. I don't know if you remember this. Johnny Carson used to do

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this thing, which this is not my time, but I've looked up the videos because I had to

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figure out what it was a reference to.

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[CLAIRE] You're not suggesting it was my time, are you?

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[JEREMY] And they would have these, oh, I have no idea.

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[CLAIRE] You're not suggesting that, right?

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[JEREMY] It's a funny video.

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He'd get the answer and hold up this envelope.

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And then he wore this big elaborate costume like he was a fortune teller.

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And then he would tell you what the question was inside the envelope.

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And they turned it into this sort of big joke about Oracle databases.

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It's a fun little video.

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[CLAIRE] Okay. All right. I know what I have to do later today now. All right. So now we know

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the connection that user groups have to why you made the shift from Oracle to Postgres.

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but I still want to dive in to understand more about what that transition was like.

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Because I know there are a lot of people out there, some of whom are listening to this podcast,

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who are thinking about or are already on their journey to transition as a practitioner from

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working with Oracle to working with Postgres databases. And so I'm just curious, what was

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your experience like? Is that a whole episode?

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[JEREMY] Relational databases have so much in common,

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right? It's actually not as hard of a transition, I think, as most people think it might be.

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Although I, it's a tricky question to answer, because even still today, so in my current role,

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I've been immersed at GEICO.

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I've now also been immersed in the world of SQL Server much more deeply than I ever thought

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that I would be.

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And I probably wouldn't have gone out and looked for a SQL Server job, but I've had a

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lot of fun doing it.

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And the thing that I've sort of discovered along the way is that there's all these concepts

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that just transfer directly over.

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Many relational databases share a ton of the same concepts.

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You do have to sort of spend a little bit of time sort of figuring out what the name is they have

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different names of different databases, and there are some legitimate differences. For Postgres,

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you know, hands down the biggest thing is sort of the MVCC model and how sort of the whole vacuum

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thing, right, how it implements that, which is sort of unique to Postgres, but there's so many

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so many identical concepts from how query planners tend to work how cost-based optimization works

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even within the MVCC model, the sort of the basic idea of versioning rows, whether it's done

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with sort of vacuum as an out of band process or redo processing, whether you're storing the

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row versions directly in the heap or storing them somewhere else. There's a lot of these concepts that

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directly translate. So I think you probably need something to kind of really, I think it's

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hard if you're an Oracle or a SQL Server or even a Postgres, you're a Postgres DB and you want to learn

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Oracle or MySQL or SQL Server, it's a little bit tricky if you're just reading

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some blogs. But at least for me, when I have a real problem to solve, that's when kind of

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things get real. So if I have a real database that I'm working on, that's got

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an application, that gives me the opportunity of some real situations that pop up,

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so it's not just theoretical. That then I start really digging in and learning a new

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technology. And also along the way, you're like, Oh, this is a lot easier than I thought it would

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be. There's so many concepts that just directly translate across. Sometimes the details just have different names, but they're very similar. So it's like learning another language, honestly.

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[CLAIRE] So you can take your conceptual understandings with you, but the details are probably different.

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the specifics, the commands, the configuration options,

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those levels of details,

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you definitely need to pay attention.

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That's like I'm half Greek

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and when I was on a business trip to Turkey years ago,

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I was at a restaurant with a bunch of my Turkish colleagues

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and the food was so familiar to me,

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but they all had different names and they were slightly different. You could tell there [Mm-hmm.]

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was an ingredient that was perhaps I was unfamiliar with. But yeah, lots of connective tissue was

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shared between those cultures. Okay. So you transition into Postgres. Is that when you

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created this thing, the poster that I just saw at PGConf.dev a couple of weeks ago in Vancouver,

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the Postgres happiness hints poster.

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Was it because of that transition?

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[JEREMY] Yeah the happiness hints,

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I love talking about the happiness hints. This is one of my favorite topics. So the origin story of

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the happiness hints was that I went to AWS and I have a job where now I'm working with Postgres

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and I'm learning all of these things, right? And there's no better place to learn. And I brought

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in the Oracle background. A lot of the concepts came pretty quickly. But where the happiness hints

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originated the origin story was I was I was here at AWS on the Postgres team and I just kept hearing

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people say the same things they're like you know I'd be talking with a peer and they're like oh my

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gosh, I tell a customer this thing like every month, right? You know, it's just like, and I'm like,

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Oh, I'm gonna start making a list, right. I'm just gonna start writing it down. And that's,

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really kind of how it started. It was just, and it wasn't even necessarily me, originally it was

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I was collecting things. I had a lot of opportunities to work with people who'd

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been working with Postgres, either internally at Amazon — because Amazon also had been using

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Postgres internally as well, amazon.com retail, right, it's kind of everywhere. So I'm

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working with people who've been around it. And then I start going to community events, so I'm

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making, building relationships, getting to know people there. And I just, you know, you hear these

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things repeated. And it was almost a great way for me to learn Postgres, the process of just

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kind of making the list and collecting all of these things that there seemed to be consensus

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about. It was like my personal notes, really. This is sort of all the things that I need to remember.

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And I just did it, you know, I might have for a minute just had it in some internal.

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But pretty quickly, I was like, I'm just going to put this, make it on my blog, right, where

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anybody can see it.

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Or I think maybe originally it was on Twitter, right?

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And I just, that kind of became a thing.

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Pretty quickly, you know, I just, I thought it was a useful thing and I just started maintaining

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it.

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And it's, you know, time goes by.

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It's crazy to me that it's been seven years since 2017, sorry, more than, almost 10 years

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now since 2017.

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And you just kind of keep doing it, you know, year after year, building it up.

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And that's kind of that's what it is.

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[CLAIRE] There are actually so many places in life where it makes sense to keep a list

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You know, how you hear it from other — maybe, well, I've heard from other teammates who keep

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a list of accolades or compliments that they've given. So that way, if they've ever had a really

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bad week or bad day, they can look at it if they needed that bit of inspiration. Otherwise, [I like that.]

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it's easy to forget about those compliments, those unsolicited things that people said that

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really brought a smile to your face. For years, I used to keep a list of all the books I'd read

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because I've read so many books that I've forgotten, you know, a lot of them. And I'm

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not doing that right now. And I'm really regretting it because it's so nice to go back and look at it

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and reflect. And yeah, but I like that you collected these happiness hints. And then there

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was this poster exhibit. I think it was the second year that PGConf.dev has had a poster exhibit

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up in Vancouver at the annual development conference. And you submitted it there. And I'm

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assuming. Did the poster exhibit cause you to refresh it, make it more up to date? Yeah? Okay.

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[JEREMY] Yes.

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So I think it was Gwen Shapira, who if I wasn't, so me going to Vancouver this year was also

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almost an accident.

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I wasn't originally, I didn't originally think I'd be able to make it up just like kind

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of to fit it in.

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I don't do a ton of traveling right now, just season.

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[CLAIRE] Okay, but we talked about that too in February?

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February?

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But what did Gwen do?

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Tell me.

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[JEREMY] Well, Gwen tagged me, I think it was on LinkedIn, but she was like, hey, they're doing a poster

387
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session, you should submit the happiness. I think it was her that first sort of poked me and suggested

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the idea. And I thought, well, shoot, it's hard to argue with that. It really does seem like the

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format is pretty well suited. And I also kind of knew that if I did that, it had been at this point

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by this year, I actually had sort of a backlog of probably been about three or four years since I

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last updated it. So I'd been, you know, you get, you post it and then people like would reply on

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Twitter and they're like, you have all these discussions. They're like, well, what about this

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topic? And so I had this kind of list of topics where I'm like, here's these things that probably

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should be integrated in the happiness hints, but I hadn't just taken the time to sit down. So I knew

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it. I knew, I knew first of all, it was a good idea. She had a pretty good point that the

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format was well suited. And I also knew if I signed up, I'd be forcing myself. I'm like, okay, I have

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a deadline now. I have to actually update these things, try to merge in all of these three years

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worth of updates before that conference happens. So yeah, I signed up. And I think sometimes I'm

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really glad when somebody sort of pokes you like that, just gives you the nudge to do something that

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you kind of wanted to do, but you probably wouldn't have if somebody hadn't given you the little push.

401
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That's definitely what Vancouver was this year, and the happiness hints were kind of the thing.

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[CLAIRE] Well, I find that sometimes that nudge, that push that people give you that prompts you to do something that maybe you've been procrastinating on or that stays number 11 on your to-do list and never moves above number 11.

403
00:28:40,360 --> 00:28:42,920
It's just not getting the time it deserves.

404
00:28:43,700 --> 00:28:45,820
Sometimes it's not that time consuming.

405
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It's not that hard.

406
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It's the activation energy that was missing.

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But then once you do it, you're like, oh, my gosh, I'm going to be done with this in X number of hours.

408
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This is, I don't know, that nudge is so important.

409
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So yeah, kudos to Gwen.

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Now, for those of you listening, Gwen Shapira is actually a past Talking Postgres podcast guest.

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So she was a guest on the show just a couple of months ago.

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And she also talked about her transition story moving as a practitioner from Oracle to Postgres.

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And she had a big NoSQL detour along the way too.

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So that was a fascinating conversation.

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And I will be sure to include a link in the show notes when we...

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[JEREMY] And a side note on that, I don't remember for sure, but I think I first met Gwen at something related to the Oak Table Network.

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[CLAIRE] Really?

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Well, I also know that in the episode with Gwen, she gave you a shout out.

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[JEREMY] I might be misremembering that, but I think that's what it was.

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[CLAIRE] She gave you a shout out in her transition that she reached out to you because were you

421
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guys former teammates?

422
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Is that right?

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[JEREMY] I think we might have overlapped, but we, we knew each other, sort of, it was more than just like being at the same company. We, it was whether through user groups through kind of just conference networking things. We had just kind of bumped into each other in the industry at large.

424
00:30:15,180 --> 00:30:18,300
[CLAIRE] Well, I'm looking at the transcript of that episode right now.

425
00:30:18,380 --> 00:30:22,740
And it says that one of the first things she did when she was transitioning to work with

426
00:30:22,960 --> 00:30:29,360
Postgres was to reach out to you and to get tips and suggestions from you on what to do,

427
00:30:29,720 --> 00:30:30,660
how to, how to get started.

428
00:30:30,780 --> 00:30:31,780
So yeah, cool. [She's pretty amazing.]

429
00:30:37,300 --> 00:30:41,480
So Postgres Happiness Hints, it is published online now. [It is.]

430
00:30:41,760 --> 00:30:47,160
So you can go to the PGConf.dev schedule and they have all the, they have all the posters available online.

431
00:30:48,140 --> 00:31:10,700
[JEREMY] Yes. And I saw that Aaron just posted the link to the PGConf.dev, but actually that's not the best link. And the reason is, so continuing the story about the poster session in Vancouver this year, I, you know, so it got, you know, it was kind of, they had a section of the place where the conference was, where they had all the posters taped up on the wall.

432
00:31:11,340 --> 00:31:16,120
They had one time that was sort of set aside for, you know, we could, if we wanted, kind

433
00:31:16,120 --> 00:31:17,620
of go hang out, stand next to our poster.

434
00:31:17,780 --> 00:31:20,940
And it was sort of a dedicated time for people to ask questions, kind of walk around.

435
00:31:22,200 --> 00:31:29,200
I think I was the only person, though, who took it sort of a little more extreme.

436
00:31:29,680 --> 00:31:31,040
And I did two things.

437
00:31:31,260 --> 00:31:35,320
I brought a Sharpie with me and I marked up my poster all over.

438
00:31:35,380 --> 00:31:37,460
I kept crossing things out and adding notes.

439
00:31:38,100 --> 00:31:47,620
So I used the whole Vancouver conference mostly to collect feedback on stuff that was still not well written enough or things that were missing.

440
00:31:50,200 --> 00:31:56,540
And then I also had this little box that I set on the windowsill directly under the poster for the entire conference.

441
00:31:56,650 --> 00:31:58,520
And it said, please add your happiness hints.

442
00:31:58,550 --> 00:32:00,360
And I had a stack of note cards and a pen.

443
00:32:00,950 --> 00:32:06,280
And not lots of people, but a couple of people did stick suggestions on a note card, drop them in the box.

444
00:32:06,920 --> 00:32:13,700
So when I came home from Vancouver, yeah, I had a lot more work to do when I came home. [What a great idea.]

445
00:32:14,100 --> 00:32:20,280
So I came home from Vancouver and then I had to spend the next couple of days, okay, now we have to update them yet again.

446
00:32:20,940 --> 00:32:21,500
But I did.

447
00:32:21,700 --> 00:32:25,700
I really wanted this to be the opportunity to kind of just bring it up to date.

448
00:32:26,240 --> 00:32:27,720
I got a lot of great feedback.

449
00:32:28,060 --> 00:32:35,520
Not only at that, but I remember, oh gosh, I remember over, they also did these dinner groups in Vancouver, which is such a cool idea.

450
00:32:36,360 --> 00:32:41,520
you could just say I'm interested. And then I think Paul Ramsey was one of the people that did

451
00:32:41,660 --> 00:32:45,320
a lot of the organizing work. And he would kind of just randomly assign people into a group,

452
00:32:45,420 --> 00:32:49,920
maybe eight people, give you a restaurant, and you just kind of all go for dinner on this day with

453
00:32:49,920 --> 00:32:57,560
these eight people. And it was amazing because both of the dinners that I went to, they were a mix of

454
00:32:58,300 --> 00:33:02,319
there was one or two people at each of these dinners where I'm like, oh my gosh, I've read your stuff

455
00:33:02,340 --> 00:33:06,900
online for like years, never thought I'd actually meet you in real life, actually get to have

456
00:33:06,900 --> 00:33:07,540
a conversation.

457
00:33:08,500 --> 00:33:12,700
And then also you have this mix of people that you haven't met before, but everybody

458
00:33:12,900 --> 00:33:13,660
is super interesting.

459
00:33:13,980 --> 00:33:15,200
Everybody has an interesting story.

460
00:33:15,820 --> 00:33:19,640
Everybody has a reason that they decided to come to this conference, which is sort of a

461
00:33:19,760 --> 00:33:21,260
core Postgres hacking conference.

462
00:33:22,000 --> 00:33:22,880
It was a lot of fun.

463
00:33:22,930 --> 00:33:27,180
And we absolutely ended up, you know, over the course of one of those dinners in particular,

464
00:33:27,640 --> 00:33:32,280
just talking about the happiness and talking about specific ones.

465
00:33:32,360 --> 00:33:33,940
And, what do you think?

466
00:33:33,940 --> 00:33:34,600
Do you agree with this?

467
00:33:34,760 --> 00:33:35,400
Is this a good idea?

468
00:33:35,560 --> 00:33:36,320
Should this be up there?

469
00:33:36,880 --> 00:33:38,300
There's all kinds of interesting conversations.

470
00:33:38,320 --> 00:33:41,020
So I brought back all of this from the conference.

471
00:33:41,700 --> 00:33:43,160
And then I created a whole new version.

472
00:33:43,800 --> 00:33:46,400
I mean, not a whole new version, but I incorporated all of that in

473
00:33:46,880 --> 00:33:50,620
and made another pretty significant update to them post-conference.

474
00:33:51,560 --> 00:33:55,040
[CLAIRE] And that's the one on your blog post. Okay.

475
00:33:52,500 --> 00:33:56,800
[JEREMY] And then, yes, yes, that's the one that's posted on my website.

476
00:33:57,000 --> 00:34:01,760
So that's probably the best site to bookmark, because that's where you'll see the latest updates

477
00:34:02,540 --> 00:34:07,160
[CLAIRE] Okay. Got it. So even if you, yeah, and the version I'm looking at that I linked to

478
00:34:07,500 --> 00:34:12,600
is dated 5/25. So yeah, after the conference. Perfect.

479
00:34:13,240 --> 00:34:14,100
[JEREMY] 4/25 right

480
00:34:15,120 --> 00:34:20,800
[CLAIRE] 5/25? What do you mean 4/25? It had to be in May. It was after the conference, right?

481
00:34:20,800 --> 00:34:26,899
[JEREMY] Oh, on the website is for, yes, that's right. The one that says 5/12 was at the, yes, so I versioned it

482
00:34:27,360 --> 00:34:32,100
as everything should be versioned in life, right? Yes, you're exactly right. 5/25 was

483
00:34:32,260 --> 00:34:35,700
the after the conference, 5/12 was before the conference, yep.

484
00:34:36,020 --> 00:34:43,059
[CLAIRE] Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. The idea of versioning a PDF graphic, I make this

485
00:34:43,080 --> 00:34:50,100
infographic every year. And I don't want people to get confused, but lots of people do not version

486
00:34:50,620 --> 00:34:54,340
their posters and their graphics. And I don't understand that because if you're going to keep

487
00:34:54,360 --> 00:35:01,380
it alive and keep updating it, you got to tell the difference. Okay. So I think it might be time

488
00:35:02,200 --> 00:35:07,559
to, well, no, I want to get into user groups. I want to get into user groups, but you have one more

489
00:35:07,580 --> 00:35:13,760
interesting job change that might... Let's just talk about it for a couple of minutes.

490
00:35:14,690 --> 00:35:23,300
You at some point left AWS and you moved to GEICO. And I'm just curious if that has any

491
00:35:23,540 --> 00:35:27,900
connective threads that will take us into the user group story. Is that a good way to get there?

492
00:35:29,800 --> 00:35:36,080
[JEREMY] I don't know if it'll go straight to user groups, but the one comment I would make is that one of

493
00:35:36,100 --> 00:35:44,220
things that did really appeal to me about GEICO was that I knew there would be the opportunity,

494
00:35:44,340 --> 00:35:49,000
they would be supportive of just continuing to have some of these relationships in the open source

495
00:35:49,200 --> 00:35:55,800
community to be able to spend some amount of time working in the open source space. And that was very

496
00:35:55,860 --> 00:36:00,800
motivating for me. I think that's motivating for a lot of engineers, right? Just one of the really

497
00:36:00,820 --> 00:36:07,400
cool things about open source and open source communities is just being able to make those

498
00:36:07,640 --> 00:36:12,720
connections across companies, make connections across the world where you get to talk about

499
00:36:12,900 --> 00:36:13,980
really cool engineering stuff.

500
00:36:14,940 --> 00:36:16,540
So that was very appealing for me.

501
00:36:16,560 --> 00:36:23,060
And it really was, I think, it was a decision on my part that this Postgres stuff is real.

502
00:36:23,060 --> 00:36:27,840
Because I remember when I took the job in 2017, I wasn't actively seeking out a Postgres

503
00:36:28,140 --> 00:36:29,320
job per se.

504
00:36:30,720 --> 00:36:39,020
but over the course from 2017 until over the course of time, Postgres, I think part of it is that

505
00:36:39,800 --> 00:36:46,820
prior to 2017 I spent a lot of time in the Oracle world I really enjoyed the database field there

506
00:36:46,820 --> 00:36:51,460
were so many concepts I was just like this is so cool whether you know and I was never on the

507
00:36:51,640 --> 00:36:55,800
academic side I was always much more on the practitioner side on sort of the business side

508
00:36:55,820 --> 00:36:57,660
the operation, just operating, running databases.

509
00:36:57,980 --> 00:36:59,200
I just thought this is cool stuff.

510
00:36:59,310 --> 00:37:00,520
I love these database things.

511
00:37:01,860 --> 00:37:06,160
And I also, throughout the course of that time, the community aspects always were a huge

512
00:37:06,300 --> 00:37:06,800
part of my story.

513
00:37:06,930 --> 00:37:08,900
And that was, it was very enriching to me.

514
00:37:09,030 --> 00:37:11,100
It was something that I enjoyed a lot.

515
00:37:11,260 --> 00:37:16,200
So the transition to Postgres was so, when I found Postgres, I was like, it's like

516
00:37:16,200 --> 00:37:17,460
I was born to be here, right?

517
00:37:17,600 --> 00:37:22,720
It's not only do you have the community aspects of just kind of, there is this dynamic

518
00:37:22,790 --> 00:37:23,920
that I can sort of go talk.

519
00:37:24,060 --> 00:37:25,960
people are interested in kind of getting to know each other.

520
00:37:26,600 --> 00:37:30,420
On top of that, the actual code itself is open source.

521
00:37:30,590 --> 00:37:32,540
I mean, how much better can it be, right?

522
00:37:32,860 --> 00:37:33,580
The code is open source.

523
00:37:33,610 --> 00:37:37,920
And not only is the code open source, but the mailing lists are there and they're public.

524
00:37:38,130 --> 00:37:43,680
You can actually read the discussions about why some decision or another decision

525
00:37:43,880 --> 00:37:44,320
was made.

526
00:37:44,450 --> 00:37:47,900
You can go look at the git blame and then you can kind of get that back to a commit

527
00:37:47,930 --> 00:37:50,500
and in the commit, it's going to have a link to the mailing list thread.

528
00:37:51,080 --> 00:37:54,080
So not only is the code there, but the discussions are even there.

529
00:37:54,200 --> 00:37:59,300
I mean, I was just like when I already had the community piece from Oracle, I was like

530
00:37:59,360 --> 00:38:00,160
this, I love this.

531
00:38:00,440 --> 00:38:03,200
And in the Oracle side, people still publish books.

532
00:38:03,350 --> 00:38:05,960
They blogged a lot about how things work inside of Oracle.

533
00:38:06,800 --> 00:38:08,460
And that was, you know, I loved that.

534
00:38:08,730 --> 00:38:10,200
I just sort of thrived on that.

535
00:38:10,640 --> 00:38:12,120
I love the IOUG.

536
00:38:12,210 --> 00:38:17,460
I love the big sort of community, both the local user group stuff and also the larger

537
00:38:17,640 --> 00:38:19,620
user driven events, Collaborate conference.

538
00:38:20,720 --> 00:38:23,720
But Postgres, man, when I when I bumped into it, it was just a match made.

539
00:38:23,820 --> 00:38:26,740
I felt like this is where I was meant to be because databases are fun.

540
00:38:27,040 --> 00:38:27,800
Community stuff is fun.

541
00:38:28,220 --> 00:38:32,080
On top of that, it's a very open community and process.

542
00:38:33,180 --> 00:38:40,840
You know, I don't consider I'm really not any kind of a core Postgres hacker or anything, but I just love being sort of around the community.

543
00:38:43,580 --> 00:38:48,760
[CLAIRE] Yeah, I think as you and I were getting ready for today, one of the things you told me is that it

544
00:38:48,900 --> 00:38:57,940
was intentional that you stayed with Postgres in this next job that you took at GEICO. And

545
00:38:57,960 --> 00:39:04,240
think about something Melanie Plageman has asked me in the past, which is to dig into, well,

546
00:39:04,400 --> 00:39:10,660
why do people continue with Postgres? What keeps them coming back? Why do they stay with it? So you

547
00:39:10,780 --> 00:39:16,980
kind of sort of just answered that a little bit. And I love the fact that you said that you feel like

548
00:39:17,220 --> 00:39:22,839
Postgres is made for you or where you're supposed to be, or I'll have to look at the transcript to

549
00:39:22,860 --> 00:39:32,580
figure out what your exact words were, but such a neat idea that there's this space that speaks to

550
00:39:32,700 --> 00:39:38,420
so many different parts of what you like to do and what you enjoy doing. So that's kind of cool.

551
00:39:38,520 --> 00:39:40,240
[JEREMY] I feel lucky I kind of fell into it.

552
00:39:40,800 --> 00:39:47,120
[CLAIRE] Yeah. Well, I think when you talk to lots and lots of successful people in this world,

553
00:39:47,640 --> 00:39:53,800
they each have a bit of serendipity and luck in their backgrounds. If anyone out there is just

554
00:39:53,960 --> 00:40:02,580
starting out, don't think that every choice was intentional. So I don't know whether to call it

555
00:40:02,780 --> 00:40:12,020
fate or what to call it. Okay. Let's go into user groups. You talked about how it's been part of

556
00:40:12,020 --> 00:40:18,720
your DNA since those early, early formative years. But then you get to Seattle, before you got to

557
00:40:18,920 --> 00:40:25,500
Seattle, you were not involved in organizing any user groups in person or online. Is that right?

558
00:40:25,620 --> 00:40:41,300
[JEREMY] Well, no, that's not quite right. So on the Oracle side, when I lived in Chicago, there was a brief period of time where I was the main organizer for a very short period for the Chicago Oracle user group. [Oh, yeah. Okay.]

559
00:40:42,260 --> 00:40:48,300
Before I handed that off to an amazing guy named Alfredo, who is still the main organizer today of the Chicago Oracle user group.

560
00:40:48,780 --> 00:40:53,140
I remember at that period in time, that was when I first got on the meetup.com platform,

561
00:40:53,320 --> 00:40:55,180
and I experimented with lots of things.

562
00:40:55,260 --> 00:40:59,540
I experimented with what we called lunch huddles, which I was trying to get these downtown Chicago

563
00:40:59,760 --> 00:41:01,180
lunch meetups with Oracle people going.

564
00:41:01,800 --> 00:41:02,980
It was a fun idea.

565
00:41:03,020 --> 00:41:04,940
I think we did a few, but it never really caught on.

566
00:41:06,600 --> 00:41:12,080
But then another thing that I had done in the Oracle time was I came up with something called

567
00:41:12,320 --> 00:41:17,259
RAC Attack, which was this sort of, we'd go to conferences and then we'd set up a table

568
00:41:17,280 --> 00:41:22,420
and just basically say, we have this comprehensive set of instructions. You bring your laptop,

569
00:41:22,660 --> 00:41:26,000
just sit down here, we'll walk you through it. You can set up an entire cluster database on your

570
00:41:26,300 --> 00:41:32,740
laptop just for fun, really. And this thing ran all over the world. So I had done some community

571
00:41:33,040 --> 00:41:37,080
organizing and user group types of thing. I'd started down that path in the Oracle space.

572
00:41:37,800 --> 00:41:46,160
So when I moved to Seattle in 2017, almost the first thing that I did was look for a user group.

573
00:41:46,220 --> 00:41:52,140
I was like, going to see what's out there. Right. And there was a Seattle Postgres user group.

574
00:41:52,960 --> 00:41:57,700
I did not start the Seattle Postgres user group and I'm not, you know, the organizer. I am a

575
00:41:57,820 --> 00:42:02,900
co-organizer together with Lloyd Albin, who is an amazing guy who's been, who's been running the

576
00:42:03,260 --> 00:42:09,620
Seattle Postgres user group. I think all the way back to 2009, we were, he and I were sitting

577
00:42:09,680 --> 00:42:13,360
down once trying to figure out how long it's been going for, it's been going for a really long time.

578
00:42:14,900 --> 00:42:18,840
So yeah, first thing I did when I got here was I was like, I was going to see what's out there.

579
00:42:18,880 --> 00:42:19,660
Oh, there was a user group.

580
00:42:19,680 --> 00:42:20,680
I was there the next month.

581
00:42:20,860 --> 00:42:21,640
I was there.

582
00:42:22,480 --> 00:42:24,060
I dropped into the Seattle Postgres.

583
00:42:24,200 --> 00:42:27,220
I started going within a few months of moving to Seattle.

584
00:42:29,040 --> 00:42:29,460
[CLAIRE] Very cool.

585
00:42:31,540 --> 00:42:38,500
How did you go from being an attendee or a lurker at this Seattle Postgres user group

586
00:42:38,880 --> 00:42:43,460
to getting connected with Lloyd and becoming a co-organizer?

587
00:42:44,660 --> 00:42:45,500
Is there a story there?

588
00:42:45,620 --> 00:42:52,480
[JEREMY] It wasn't like a really large, you, I mean, it's not like a hundred people

589
00:42:53,240 --> 00:42:56,820
I think I was there almost every month.

590
00:42:57,520 --> 00:43:01,100
So very quickly, Lloyd and I got to know each other pretty well and a few other

591
00:43:01,260 --> 00:43:02,140
people who were regulars.

592
00:43:03,519 --> 00:43:07,340
So, you know, yeah, we kind of knew each other.

593
00:43:07,580 --> 00:43:14,420
I think on the, you know, it wasn't, it's not super formal, at that point, especially

594
00:43:14,520 --> 00:43:16,220
the first few years that I lived in Seattle.

595
00:43:17,380 --> 00:43:21,939
I mean, I think that I sort of talked about things that was, that I thought were interesting

596
00:43:21,960 --> 00:43:31,620
a few times. Where really pivoted was so COVID, right? Pandemic, that thing. So most things,

597
00:43:31,860 --> 00:43:36,400
you know, you had to kind of stop meetups. And it was when we restarted after, you know,

598
00:43:36,450 --> 00:43:43,900
so things kind of phasing back in. And at that point, I, you know, I just, when I started taking

599
00:43:43,910 --> 00:43:48,279
a more active role, so I had pinged out to Lloyd and I was like, hey, let's, you want to try to get

600
00:43:48,300 --> 00:43:53,820
going. And he was happy for me to help out. I probably would have been happy for me to

601
00:43:53,880 --> 00:43:59,060
help out anytime. I mean, user group organizing is a lot of work. So that, but I think that

602
00:43:59,280 --> 00:44:08,320
was when I just started taking a more active role in the Seattle group, was probably around 2021, 2022,

603
00:44:09,380 --> 00:44:16,279
I don't remember for sure, but whenever it was that we started back up.

604
00:44:14,440 --> 00:44:21,740
[CLAIRE] So full disclosure, you had me come as a speaker to your Seattle Postgres user group earlier this [Yes, thank you.]

605
00:44:21,790 --> 00:44:27,480
year. It took a little while, back and forth and back and forth on dates. I think we chitchatted

606
00:44:27,720 --> 00:44:33,400
for over a year probably because I don't live in Seattle and I'm a whole plane flight away and needed

607
00:44:33,420 --> 00:44:36,720
to dovetail it with another business trip.

608
00:44:37,960 --> 00:44:40,700
But if I remember correctly, you...

609
00:44:40,700 --> 00:44:41,380
Well, I do remember.

610
00:44:42,040 --> 00:44:44,860
You host it at the Fred Hutch Cancer Center.

611
00:44:44,950 --> 00:44:45,560
Is that right?

612
00:44:46,400 --> 00:44:47,940
[JEREMY] That is where we're hosting right now.

613
00:44:48,160 --> 00:44:48,320
Yes.

614
00:44:50,220 --> 00:44:52,540
[CLAIRE] And it's just this amazing location. [It is.]

615
00:44:54,040 --> 00:44:56,100
I thought the buildings were beautiful.

616
00:44:56,670 --> 00:44:58,120
The facilities were lovely.

617
00:44:58,700 --> 00:44:59,260
I don't know.

618
00:44:59,410 --> 00:45:00,740
I just thought it was...

619
00:45:00,160 --> 00:45:01,800
[JEREMY] We're very lucky to have that spot too.

620
00:45:01,860 --> 00:45:09,420
So Lloyd works at the Hutch, which is why that location is easy for us to use.

621
00:45:10,340 --> 00:45:15,300
And still, I think having a good location, if you want to have a user group.

622
00:45:15,620 --> 00:45:34,600
There's two things you sort of have to have. The location is the first thing, right? Anybody who wants to do a user group, you need to have a place to meet, first and foremost. The second thing you probably need, most people, you don't necessarily need to have a speaker, but most people do, kind of sort of want to do it as, you know, so these are your two things, your two biggest things.

623
00:45:34,700 --> 00:45:37,980
And then sort of the third topic to get into is money and sponsors and things.

624
00:45:38,120 --> 00:45:39,720
And that's, I think, sort of more minor.

625
00:45:39,920 --> 00:45:42,600
But because if you don't, if you don't have a location, you don't have a group, right?

626
00:45:44,020 --> 00:45:44,980
That's kind of first and foremost.

627
00:45:45,240 --> 00:45:50,820
And finding locations, I've talked to other user group organizers, and I've heard from

628
00:45:50,940 --> 00:45:56,860
a lot of people that it just, it feels really hard, in 2026, harder than it's been

629
00:45:56,880 --> 00:45:57,460
in a while.

630
00:45:58,400 --> 00:46:00,480
I feel like a lot of organizers, I've just sort of heard rumors.

631
00:46:00,720 --> 00:46:01,960
It's just like, it's a lot more work.

632
00:46:02,100 --> 00:46:06,160
There's a lot more pushback from companies like we're not really sure.

633
00:46:07,580 --> 00:46:13,240
So it's, you know, I don't take it for granted that we've been able to, that the Hutch has

634
00:46:13,380 --> 00:46:16,260
kind of graciously allowed us to use the space so far.

635
00:46:17,140 --> 00:46:18,340
These things are never really guaranteed.

636
00:46:18,800 --> 00:46:21,300
But yeah, we're very fortunate that we've been able to meet there.

637
00:46:21,380 --> 00:46:24,400
We have tried rotating it around a little bit over the years.

638
00:46:26,700 --> 00:46:32,720
In theory, I like the idea of kind of moving it around just to kind of have different places.

639
00:46:33,779 --> 00:46:38,920
In practice, it's much easier to just kind of have your spot and it's a little bit less work.

640
00:46:39,540 --> 00:46:42,600
It's also for people, you know, they know, you know, people who are coming,

641
00:46:43,740 --> 00:46:46,700
know where to park, you know, they kind of, they know the layout, they know where to go.

642
00:46:47,100 --> 00:46:50,960
So having it in the same place is beneficial for a couple of reasons.

643
00:46:51,800 --> 00:46:52,500
[CLAIRE] Yeah, it's interesting.

644
00:46:52,580 --> 00:47:03,860
You might think that knowing where to park in this day and age with iPhones and maps and everything is not that big a deal, but it does create some mental friction.

645
00:47:04,540 --> 00:47:08,980
There's just something really sweet about knowing exactly where you're going to go.

646
00:47:09,980 --> 00:47:10,600
That familiarity.

647
00:47:10,160 --> 00:47:15,720
[JEREMY] Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if iPhones make parking easier. Every time I have to go downtown

648
00:47:15,820 --> 00:47:21,120
Seattle and then try to find parking, I don't know, it's always a different adventure.

649
00:47:19,540 --> 00:47:24,280
[CLAIRE] Well, I mean, they should make parking, they should make parking easier. I agree with you. They don't. So the familiarity is still.

650
00:47:21,300 --> 00:47:33,640
[JEREMY] Well, I mean, if there's parking garages all over, part of it depends on if you're really looking for the cheap parking or if you just want to pay all the money, right.

651
00:47:38,120 --> 00:47:45,380
[CLAIRE] Yeah. Or, or my, my fear is that the garage closes at 10 and I get there at 10.01 PM or

652
00:47:45,400 --> 00:47:52,760
whatever [Oh, yeah.] and you get stuck. Right. [I've had that happen.] I don't. So, okay. So you started to talk about the two to

653
00:47:52,860 --> 00:47:58,820
three things that you need. And we definitely should talk about mechanics and your best

654
00:47:58,980 --> 00:48:05,980
practices and tips and recommendations, but still, why do you do it? Why do you organize,

655
00:48:07,060 --> 00:48:14,260
co-organize with Lloyd this meetup? What's in it for you and your heart and mind and soul.

656
00:48:13,840 --> 00:48:20,020
[JEREMY] I was thinking about that a lot over the last couple of days, mainly because you suggested making that the title of the podcast.

657
00:48:21,570 --> 00:48:23,800
I was like, oh, shoot, well, now I have to think of an answer for this question.

658
00:48:26,280 --> 00:48:29,620
It's actually not as easy to answer as I thought it would be.

659
00:48:30,980 --> 00:48:32,960
I can tell you why I like user groups.

660
00:48:34,260 --> 00:48:36,040
[CLAIRE] Okay, let's start there and then we'll come back to it.

661
00:48:35,860 --> 00:48:36,080
[JEREMY] Sure.

662
00:48:36,670 --> 00:48:37,800
We'll start with why I like them.

663
00:48:37,880 --> 00:48:41,940
And I think a couple of things that I've said in the past that I'll stand by.

664
00:48:43,360 --> 00:48:44,960
I do like the social aspects.

665
00:48:45,160 --> 00:48:46,420
I like the networking aspects.

666
00:48:47,280 --> 00:48:50,500
Two things that I really like are the low barriers to entry and the open doors.

667
00:48:50,660 --> 00:48:55,440
And what I mean by that, I've sort of said this once before, but the low barriers to entry

668
00:48:55,660 --> 00:48:57,520
meaning that you don't have to pay to go.

669
00:48:57,780 --> 00:49:03,100
It's not like a professional association or a conference where they charge hundreds or

670
00:49:03,240 --> 00:49:04,300
thousands of dollars for tickets.

671
00:49:05,400 --> 00:49:08,820
Really anybody, it's very accessible.

672
00:49:09,040 --> 00:49:09,860
Anybody can show up.

673
00:49:10,780 --> 00:49:13,400
And the open doors sort of along similar notes.

674
00:49:16,800 --> 00:49:17,900
What I've said is like you can't,

675
00:49:18,020 --> 00:49:20,700
if you're a customer of Amazon or Microsoft,

676
00:49:21,300 --> 00:49:23,220
that doesn't mean you can just kind of drive to Redmond

677
00:49:23,270 --> 00:49:25,680
and walk in there and sit down next to one of the core engineers

678
00:49:25,710 --> 00:49:27,060
and start asking them questions, right?

679
00:49:28,320 --> 00:49:30,540
But with user groups, it's amazing,

680
00:49:31,090 --> 00:49:33,979
you know, the kind of people that you can bump into at user groups

681
00:49:34,260 --> 00:49:37,800
And, you can just, you know, strike up a conversation and ask them any, and there's

682
00:49:37,920 --> 00:49:43,080
people around at these user groups who can answer all kinds of questions who have a lot of

683
00:49:43,220 --> 00:49:44,660
technical background and experience.

684
00:49:44,780 --> 00:49:50,060
I just, I've always loved that about user groups, being able to connect with, I connect with people

685
00:49:50,180 --> 00:49:53,580
that share your interests and your hobbies, but also connect that you can learn so much.

686
00:49:53,660 --> 00:49:56,380
They really function that way for me, my whole story.

687
00:49:57,460 --> 00:50:03,239
And that's why I mentioned, even the sort of the move to Seattle and the job, when I mentioned

688
00:50:03,260 --> 00:50:07,260
sort of Jeremiah Wilton making that suggestion, hey, apply for this job. I connected with him

689
00:50:07,260 --> 00:50:11,600
through the oak table and the oak table, I had gone to that. I remember meeting Jeremiah in person

690
00:50:11,820 --> 00:50:17,540
at that Michigan oak table symposium, those networking opportunities, user groups really

691
00:50:17,700 --> 00:50:23,380
facilitate that. And that was part of my story, user groups and Lansing user groups in Chicago

692
00:50:24,240 --> 00:50:30,159
have always, one way that I've said it in the past is it's a little bit like the express lanes on the

693
00:50:30,180 --> 00:50:34,420
highway. I may have gotten there eventually, but you can, sometimes you can get there a little

694
00:50:34,520 --> 00:50:38,440
bit faster if you have a really, if you cultivate a good network, cultivate a good professional

695
00:50:38,700 --> 00:50:44,080
network. It can just kind of, yeah, it can give you, it can move you forward a bit quicker. And

696
00:50:44,180 --> 00:50:49,820
user groups, user groups in the past just were helpful for me in many ways. And learning

697
00:50:50,020 --> 00:50:54,620
technical things also in sort of just opportunities to make some connections and to meet some people.

698
00:50:55,500 --> 00:51:18,340
And it's not always about the job opportunity. Sometimes it's just like, wow, I, you know, there's a guy who comes to the Seattle Postgres user group. And I love one of the things that he talks about is like, he just feels he's like, well, if I have a tough Python question, I drop into the Python user group, and those guys can answer anything, man, I can just I can ask him any question about Python, and they can tell me the answer. And that's, you know, that's, that's part of it, too.

699
00:51:19,040 --> 00:51:20,400
So this is what I love.

700
00:51:20,780 --> 00:51:22,280
I really love about user groups.

701
00:51:22,500 --> 00:51:27,380
It's that access to sort of people that can answer questions for you.

702
00:51:27,560 --> 00:51:28,700
It's the ability to sort of network.

703
00:51:28,980 --> 00:51:31,760
Just it's fun to meet people that share the same interests you do.

704
00:51:32,840 --> 00:51:34,400
It can benefit you professionally.

705
00:51:35,480 --> 00:51:40,180
You know, if you're looking for a job, I would say, one of the best things you can do is

706
00:51:40,600 --> 00:51:44,300
not just go to a user group and sort of sit there quietly and listen, but talk

707
00:51:44,340 --> 00:51:48,360
to people and just kind of let people know, hey, I'm looking, you know, because you

708
00:51:48,400 --> 00:51:54,660
know who might ping you or send you an email a week later and be like, "Oh, hey, did you

709
00:51:54,820 --> 00:51:58,780
say that you work with this technology? I saw a listing or my buddy works at this company

710
00:51:58,900 --> 00:52:03,980
over here. Here's a listing you should check out." You never know. So these things can benefit

711
00:52:04,140 --> 00:52:15,040
people in a lot of ways. That's what I love about it. Exactly.

712
00:52:07,760 --> 00:52:29,340
[CLAIRE] Okay. And then the question is, those are reasons to participate, to attend, to maybe even to speak. Although speaking obviously is, it's a different thing. With speaking, you are sharing your expertise, you have to do some homework, some preparation.

713
00:52:30,160 --> 00:52:40,580
Although a lot of us who might give a talk at a user group are often giving a talk that we've already prepared for, say, another user group or even a conference.

714
00:52:42,240 --> 00:52:43,960
Or sometimes people give a talk.

715
00:52:42,640 --> 00:52:44,420
[JEREMY] You had to prepare it at some point though [Yeah, I know.]

716
00:52:45,340 --> 00:52:46,560
To give it the first time.

717
00:52:45,960 --> 00:52:47,180
[CLAIRE] So you had to prepare it at some point.

718
00:52:47,380 --> 00:52:52,960
So there's actual, real prep work that has to be done to go give a talk at a user group.

719
00:52:53,020 --> 00:53:06,920
But it is, as a speaker, it's a little bit of a different vibe because you can have, you know, especially if there's only 30 people in the room, it's less intimidating than a conference that might be bigger with more people in the room.

720
00:53:07,660 --> 00:53:15,320
And also you can have more of a conversation at times, too, because it isn't like, OK, your 45 minute slot is over.

721
00:53:15,640 --> 00:53:17,420
Everybody leaves the room to go to the next session.

722
00:53:17,960 --> 00:53:20,000
Right. There's food. There's drink.

723
00:53:20,300 --> 00:53:22,460
People are staying longer and there's more Q&A.

724
00:53:22,520 --> 00:53:30,740
So that's kind of cool. And you get feedback as to like maybe what's not working, you can

725
00:53:31,130 --> 00:53:35,840
read the audience a bit better notice when they get bored or what they're interested in

726
00:53:36,130 --> 00:53:43,280
Okay, so that's the speaker angle. My view, maybe the short abbreviated view, but why

727
00:53:44,000 --> 00:53:46,200
co-organize and how much work is it really?

728
00:53:45,760 --> 00:53:46,120
[JEREMY] Exactly.

729
00:53:47,380 --> 00:53:48,260
It's a lot of work.

730
00:53:50,140 --> 00:53:51,100
And that's it, right?

731
00:53:51,270 --> 00:53:52,700
That's what I kept thinking about this week.

732
00:53:52,700 --> 00:53:54,440
And I was like, why am I doing all this work?

733
00:53:54,640 --> 00:53:55,340
It's a lot of work.

734
00:53:56,980 --> 00:54:01,180
I don't know because it is a lot of work.

735
00:54:03,420 --> 00:54:06,880
And there's a lot of ways that we can spend our time.

736
00:54:07,160 --> 00:54:12,280
I mean, I've got a middle schooler and a high schooler, and I do spend a lot of time with them.

737
00:54:13,040 --> 00:54:16,460
There's all kinds of things that we can do that are worth spending time doing.

738
00:54:18,180 --> 00:54:23,060
Trying to make the user group tick, just make the meetup actually happen.

739
00:54:23,260 --> 00:54:25,660
It is quite a bit of effort and investment.

740
00:54:26,380 --> 00:54:30,260
I mean, one reason just sort of selfishly is like, if somebody doesn't do it, the meetup's

741
00:54:30,320 --> 00:54:30,900
not going to be there.

742
00:54:33,380 --> 00:54:34,500
So that's one part of it.

743
00:54:36,760 --> 00:54:44,220
I feel like, so I've, since I've kind of been around both the Oracle and the Postgres space

744
00:54:44,460 --> 00:54:49,060
on the user group side of things, I've been able to meet other people over the past few

745
00:54:49,180 --> 00:54:49,360
years.

746
00:54:50,040 --> 00:54:53,000
Hettie does an amazing job with the Chicago groups.

747
00:54:54,300 --> 00:54:59,480
I've gotten to know, let's see who else, you know, sort of a Pat Wright has recently gotten

748
00:54:59,580 --> 00:55:02,620
really involved in Postgres stuff and he has a lot of history around SQL Server.

749
00:55:03,080 --> 00:55:06,360
It's a guy named Rick Lowe here in Seattle who's kind of been coming to the Seattle user

750
00:55:06,480 --> 00:55:06,580
group.

751
00:55:06,580 --> 00:55:09,360
He has a ton of history with the SQL Server organizing stuff.

752
00:55:10,180 --> 00:55:14,340
I haven't gotten to know Tom Kincaid really well, but I know he does a ton of amazing work

753
00:55:14,400 --> 00:55:17,100
and he's been keeping the Boston user group going for a long time.

754
00:55:18,200 --> 00:55:19,460
In Vancouver this year. [Shout out to Tom Kincaid. Just have to say it!]

755
00:55:22,520 --> 00:55:33,180
[CLAIRE] PGDay Boston is happening. Is it happening tomorrow? [Yes.] I think it is Tuesday, the ninth.

756
00:55:33,310 --> 00:55:39,600
So it's the inaugural first ever PGDay Boston event. They have Michael Stonebraker as the

757
00:55:39,710 --> 00:55:46,460
keynote speaker, which is kind of pretty cool. [Sounds fun.] So, and you know, many PGDays, it's a

758
00:55:46,570 --> 00:55:51,600
single track event. So smaller and, you know, not overwhelming, not multi-track, all that kind of

759
00:55:51,620 --> 00:55:51,780
stuff.

760
00:55:53,500 --> 00:55:58,500
[JEREMY] My general feeling about most organizers and all of these folks that I mentioned, are doing

761
00:55:58,700 --> 00:56:01,720
amazing work. And then there's also like, I didn't even go into Europe, but you know, you know,

762
00:56:02,580 --> 00:56:05,740
there's, there's a whole group of people in Europe that do a lot of amazing work too.

763
00:56:06,740 --> 00:56:11,280
It's like, it's a lot of work and it's, you know, nobody's doing this to be like the next tech

764
00:56:11,520 --> 00:56:14,920
billionaire, right? It's not, it's not like it's going to make you fantastically wealthy. It's,

765
00:56:15,540 --> 00:56:20,440
I think a lot of people do it partly because they want to create that space for other people.

766
00:56:20,840 --> 00:56:24,420
I actually think for some people, it's a bit of a sacrifice that they make.

767
00:56:25,470 --> 00:56:27,960
They don't have to do that, but they're passionate about it.

768
00:56:28,520 --> 00:56:30,060
It's just something they're motivated to do.

769
00:56:30,210 --> 00:56:36,260
And for me, I think part of it is, I do think that I get some sense, a little bit of

770
00:56:36,480 --> 00:56:41,380
fulfillment from the idea that I helped create a space that maybe just some other people were

771
00:56:41,390 --> 00:56:42,360
able to connect inside of.

772
00:56:43,340 --> 00:56:44,000
So that's kind of cool.

773
00:56:45,620 --> 00:56:46,820
That's part of it, probably.

774
00:56:47,520 --> 00:56:48,600
Part of it's probably selfish.

775
00:56:48,960 --> 00:56:50,880
It's like, you know, I mean, Lloyd was doing it.

776
00:56:51,460 --> 00:56:52,660
Seattle user group will probably still be there.

777
00:56:54,340 --> 00:56:56,400
So I'm not going to say that, if I wasn't doing it, it wouldn't exist.

778
00:56:56,540 --> 00:57:00,240
That's certainly not true, but being able to contribute there, there's, you know, having

779
00:57:00,400 --> 00:57:03,620
A strong user group, I get to hear, oh, I know.

780
00:57:03,700 --> 00:57:08,080
And I've mentioned this to you, when you came in to speak, I've said this a bunch

781
00:57:08,160 --> 00:57:12,100
of times that, I just, you know, with the ages of my kids, I'm not doing loads of

782
00:57:12,240 --> 00:57:12,740
traveling right now.

783
00:57:13,100 --> 00:57:18,079
I don't want to miss out on sort of this season of life and I'm sure I'll do more traveling

784
00:57:18,100 --> 00:57:24,280
later. But since I'm not currently traveling every month to go to conferences, I thought to myself,

785
00:57:24,320 --> 00:57:30,240
well, the user group will just be my excuse to bring people to Seattle since I can't go see them

786
00:57:30,340 --> 00:57:37,480
where they are. So I use the user group as an excuse. Now, I have my philosophy with the Seattle

787
00:57:37,720 --> 00:57:46,380
user group is that primarily I want it to be about Seattle. And so I very intentionally don't want to

788
00:57:46,400 --> 00:57:50,700
bring out-of-town speakers every single month. Personally, what I like, I do like to have

789
00:57:50,730 --> 00:57:55,960
an out-of-town speaker a few times a year, but I really like to have most of the speakers be local.

790
00:57:57,820 --> 00:58:01,820
But, you know, I do still, there's a few times a year and it is kind of my little excuse.

791
00:58:02,040 --> 00:58:05,940
Because I will, if there's somebody who I like really want, you know, I'm like, oh gosh,

792
00:58:06,020 --> 00:58:09,800
I'd love to catch up with this person and they're super good with Postgres. I'll be, I'll email them.

793
00:58:10,240 --> 00:58:14,260
Nikolay was a great example. Nikolay Samokhvalov, who like I've wanted to catch up with forever.

794
00:58:14,340 --> 00:58:16,220
And I'm like, gosh, how am I going to catch up with this guy?

795
00:58:16,360 --> 00:58:17,020
Where am I going to see him?

796
00:58:17,360 --> 00:58:17,700
Oh, I know.

797
00:58:17,780 --> 00:58:19,960
I'll just try to convince him to come speak at the user group.

798
00:58:20,240 --> 00:58:21,300
And I was able to do that.

799
00:58:21,960 --> 00:58:25,520
And so bonus, I got to hear him give an amazing talk and I got to catch up.

800
00:58:25,680 --> 00:58:26,200
It was really fun.

801
00:58:27,240 --> 00:58:35,220
[CLAIRE] Yeah, I mean, in our case we got to have dinner, so that was a nice benefit of being part of your user group together. [Totally. Yep. Yeah, that wasn't an accident.]

802
00:58:35,600 --> 00:58:43,200
On the Discord chat, Melanie Plageman,

803
00:58:43,560 --> 00:58:50,440
who incidentally is an organizer — not of a user group, but she's one of the, I think she was the

804
00:58:50,460 --> 00:58:56,160
program committee chair and one of the co-organizers of PGConf.dev, that annual development conference

805
00:58:56,320 --> 00:59:01,540
in Vancouver we talked about earlier. And that, of course, is a ton of work, even though it's only

806
00:59:01,740 --> 00:59:07,980
once a year and it's not every month, every month. It's a bigger affair. And she said,

807
00:59:08,720 --> 00:59:13,640
and I quote, as an organizer, the best feeling is someone saying they got something out of the event

808
00:59:13,780 --> 00:59:18,680
you organized, that they had fun, felt included, that it was productive for their jobs, et cetera.

809
00:59:20,320 --> 00:59:25,880
And as you were talking about this, I was actually thinking the same thing, this podcast,

810
00:59:26,760 --> 00:59:32,740
It is not, it is a little bit of a labor of love that Aaron Wislang, who's backstage

811
00:59:33,220 --> 00:59:36,520
as a co-producer, and I do this podcast every month.

812
00:59:36,540 --> 00:59:38,640
And of course it wouldn't exist without guests like you.

813
00:59:39,260 --> 00:59:44,960
People have to sign up and agree and trust me that, you know, they can come and have a

814
00:59:44,980 --> 00:59:51,640
conversation and it won't be embarrassing and that it'll be useful for people. But then when I meet

815
00:59:51,800 --> 00:59:56,520
someone and they tell me they listen to this episode or that episode and the benefit they got

816
00:59:56,660 --> 01:00:03,080
from it, it just is such a nice feeling knowing that you help people by creating this space or

817
01:00:03,520 --> 01:00:09,360
sharing this expertise. I don't know. It's kind of cool. Even though if I get a compliment on this

818
01:00:09,520 --> 01:00:14,240
episode, it's really, yes, the backstage work that Aaron and I do, but it's really all about you,

819
01:00:14,420 --> 01:00:18,660
Jeremy, and they're going to be quoting something that you said that influenced them.

820
01:00:20,320 --> 01:00:21,160
So that's kind of nice.

821
01:00:24,700 --> 01:00:27,160
Okay, so let's talk a little bit.

822
01:00:27,200 --> 01:00:32,020
I think we've talked about how you got started running the Postgres user group.

823
01:00:32,480 --> 01:00:37,480
But if someone's listening and they're trying to think about, oh my gosh, how would I start

824
01:00:37,600 --> 01:00:37,740
one?

825
01:00:38,060 --> 01:00:39,260
I guess you never did that.

826
01:00:39,380 --> 01:00:42,560
You didn't start one in Seattle from scratch.

827
01:00:43,640 --> 01:00:46,200
But you probably have some insight into it.

828
01:00:46,210 --> 01:00:49,760
You probably have, I would, some recommendation.

829
01:00:50,180 --> 01:00:50,900
Go look at this.

830
01:00:50,930 --> 01:00:51,960
Go talk to this person.

831
01:00:52,180 --> 01:00:52,940
Go look here.

832
01:00:53,640 --> 01:00:53,940
Do you?

833
01:00:53,760 --> 01:01:06,320
[JEREMY] Yeah. Well, yeah. So I've had opportunities where a couple of people have reached out who

834
01:01:06,350 --> 01:01:10,860
are starting user groups and they'll reach out to a bunch of you. So you'll reach out to me to

835
01:01:11,000 --> 01:01:14,040
kind of a bunch of people who are running user groups and they'll say, hey, I really want to get

836
01:01:14,040 --> 01:01:18,920
a user group started. There was a guy in Vancouver this year who wants to start a user group in

837
01:01:18,940 --> 01:01:24,900
Toronto. So if any listeners are in Toronto, we'll try to hook you up. I know there's a wonderful

838
01:01:25,020 --> 01:01:31,400
woman, Monica, who's getting user group started in Kenya. There's people around who are interested

839
01:01:31,440 --> 01:01:41,840
in trying to start things. It, yeah. Yes. Yes. I was there. Yep. Yeah.

840
01:01:33,640 --> 01:01:44,680
[CLAIRE] And there was a session about it at PGConf.dev on the Tuesday, a community discussion session that Andreas Scherbaum and Cornelia Biacsics co-organized, right?

841
01:01:45,340 --> 01:01:46,140
Okay, and you were there.

842
01:01:45,520 --> 01:01:53,420
[JEREMY] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my kind of basic feeling is don't overthink it. I mean, it's the first thing

843
01:01:53,420 --> 01:01:58,220
is like, just get some people together and do something, right? It's like anything, just do it,

844
01:01:58,400 --> 01:02:06,840
first of all. And like I said, you need a place to meet probably. But I do think sometimes you can

845
01:02:07,060 --> 01:02:13,980
worry so much about what do I need to do? What are all the boxes I need to check? And if worrying [All right.]

846
01:02:14,000 --> 01:02:19,680
for like nine months just prevents you from ever actually trying something, right. It's like,

847
01:02:20,140 --> 01:02:25,280
you know, first of all, just go try something. See who you do know. Because

848
01:02:25,380 --> 01:02:31,380
you know, it may or may not work, but it's worth trying it out, depending on what

849
01:02:31,480 --> 01:02:37,340
city you're in, whether you're able to make it work. I think it's always worth trying. It is

850
01:02:37,360 --> 01:02:45,360
I do think user groups, I don't know, it's a tough space. You know, Linux user groups,

851
01:02:45,520 --> 01:02:52,180
were kind of big for a while. They're still sort of around. They're not generally really,

852
01:02:52,340 --> 01:02:59,940
really big. As far as Postgres user groups go, there's a whole spectrum from, so the Seattle

853
01:03:00,200 --> 01:03:05,280
user group, you know, we're in Seattle, which is a big tech city. There's lots of tech people here.

854
01:03:06,900 --> 01:03:10,000
The user group that we have isn't really, really massive.

855
01:03:10,180 --> 01:03:11,860
It's not like hundreds of people every month.

856
01:03:12,400 --> 01:03:15,760
And even some of the other tech meetups that I've gone to, the systems meetup, isn't

857
01:03:15,840 --> 01:03:17,240
Hundreds of people every month.

858
01:03:19,960 --> 01:03:21,900
So starting a user group is an interesting topic.

859
01:03:22,020 --> 01:03:25,160
And people have asked me about it before, like I said.

860
01:03:25,280 --> 01:03:31,500
And I would encourage anybody to sort of try, but also depending on if you're in kind of a

861
01:03:31,520 --> 01:03:37,980
small city in the rural Midwest, it might be like you and six or 10 other people meeting

862
01:03:38,080 --> 01:03:42,340
up at a coffee shop and, hey man, if you can make that work, do it, go

863
01:03:42,480 --> 01:03:50,500
for it. But also like, don't, you know, how would I say this? If there's some amazing

864
01:03:50,980 --> 01:03:55,180
work, I think Elizabeth Christensen, right? And is in, if I remember right, Kansas City

865
01:03:55,320 --> 01:04:01,480
and has done some meetups there lately. [Kansas City, they've got a great user group there.] Yep. Yeah, they are. But I also think that there's

866
01:04:01,500 --> 01:04:05,620
sort of, you know, Kansas City is not the same size as Chicago or New York, right? So,

867
01:04:05,700 --> 01:04:10,160
they're not expecting, you know, to have their user group look the same as what a New York user

868
01:04:10,250 --> 01:04:15,000
group would look like. And I think that if I remember right, talking to Elizabeth, they've

869
01:04:15,010 --> 01:04:20,720
done a little bit of overlapping of topics, you know, I think the end goal here is just sort of

870
01:04:20,750 --> 01:04:25,780
to have something that works to connect some people together, ideally have some interests in common.

871
01:04:25,850 --> 01:04:31,460
If you can make it work with Postgres centric user group and whatever city you're in, go for

872
01:04:31,480 --> 01:04:38,780
whole bunch of people who will support you. I would say, I know myself, Pat Wright, basically

873
01:04:39,180 --> 01:04:45,040
anybody who runs Postgres user groups will happily amplify and repost on social media,

874
01:04:45,190 --> 01:04:50,100
any posts that people have. We'll do anything we can to support. I know Pat Wright has a bunch of

875
01:04:50,250 --> 01:04:55,760
really fantastic little templates and suggestions and ideas from his many years of experience.

876
01:04:56,430 --> 01:05:00,580
Just where do you look for potential meetup locations? How do you find sponsors? Here's some

877
01:05:00,600 --> 01:05:06,080
Email templates you can use. So there's various reasons. I think PGUS has also worked on,

878
01:05:06,330 --> 01:05:09,720
if I remember right, worked on kind of collecting some resources to help people get started.

879
01:05:10,520 --> 01:05:13,300
I don't think that's the hardest part though. The hardest part is just

880
01:05:13,820 --> 01:05:17,740
kind of get it going and find some people to meet together and get the meeting to actually happen.

881
01:05:18,260 --> 01:05:23,680
[CLAIRE] The other thing I want to mention is that if anybody listening does start a Postgres user group,

882
01:05:24,280 --> 01:05:32,800
that the PostgreSQL.org project website for the open source project has a whole page dedicated to

883
01:05:32,870 --> 01:05:38,700
user groups. And they list them by country, and then they have a link to wherever. So I'm assuming

884
01:05:38,730 --> 01:05:44,000
if I go down to the United States section and I look, I'm going to find Seattle on that list,

885
01:05:44,220 --> 01:05:45,560
and it'll have a link to your meetup page.

886
01:05:46,040 --> 01:05:48,700
So make sure to get listed there.

887
01:05:49,340 --> 01:05:51,460
That way, people who are, you know,

888
01:05:51,560 --> 01:05:56,100
it's a nice index into all the different places around the world.

889
01:05:56,160 --> 01:06:00,600
And then I gave a talk at PGConf.EU last year in Riga.

890
01:06:01,040 --> 01:06:03,380
So this is now more than six months out of date.

891
01:06:03,760 --> 01:06:06,880
But we looked at the whole development timeframe for Postgres 18

892
01:06:07,440 --> 01:06:12,360
and all the meetups that were listed on PostgreSQL.org's user group page.

893
01:06:12,620 --> 01:06:13,900
So there may have been other ones.

894
01:06:14,000 --> 01:06:18,300
that don't show up on this map I created because I didn't know about them because they weren't

895
01:06:18,520 --> 01:06:23,980
listed. Anyway, the point is we went and we pulled the data for how many members in that user group

896
01:06:24,400 --> 01:06:30,680
and how many actual meetups they had in that 15 month timeframe. And so Seattle in that,

897
01:06:31,180 --> 01:06:36,480
the one that you co-organized had 13 meetups in that timeframe. And you have, at the time you had

898
01:06:37,080 --> 01:06:41,700
983 members. So to be a member, those are people who've signed up on meetup and they're,

899
01:06:41,800 --> 01:06:45,220
they're kind of paying attention. They're not necessarily attending them all, right?

900
01:06:45,740 --> 01:06:53,720
[JEREMY] I don't think there's 900 people paying attention. No. [Oh, okay. Well, who were once paying attention.] It's, it's, I mean, part of that is just a

901
01:06:53,840 --> 01:06:57,940
function of how long you've had the group out there. That, the Seattle meetup,

902
01:06:58,300 --> 01:07:04,280
that meetup.com group has existed for a long time. So it's, it's been out there. I think there's

903
01:07:04,280 --> 01:07:08,660
a lot of people that just kind of click subscribe like 15 years ago and, and may not be paying super

904
01:07:08,680 --> 01:07:13,280
close attention. But yeah. Yeah.

905
01:07:09,660 --> 01:07:17,480
[CLAIRE] But if you look at this map, though, what you see is, and I got it in front of me, just how global the Postgres project is.

906
01:07:17,720 --> 01:07:19,500
People use this technology all around the world.

907
01:07:19,810 --> 01:07:23,320
So, of course, it's not a surprise that there are user groups all around the world.

908
01:07:23,540 --> 01:07:28,660
And, I mean, Europe in particular has a really vibrant set of user groups.

909
01:07:28,770 --> 01:07:33,780
I know that Daniel Gustafsson, for example, is involved in two of them in Sweden.

910
01:07:34,050 --> 01:07:39,220
I think one of them is in Malmö and one of them is based in Stockholm.

911
01:07:39,320 --> 01:07:49,140
I'm looking at the Japanese Postgres user group has been around for a long, long time and is very vibrant as well.

912
01:07:49,210 --> 01:07:54,940
So anyway, it's very impressive, but there's room for more.

913
01:07:55,980 --> 01:08:01,240
[JEREMY] I had a few conversations in Vancouver with people who do user group organizing in Europe.

914
01:08:01,470 --> 01:08:05,920
And it sounds like there's some really good things happening over there.

915
01:08:06,560 --> 01:08:11,920
And they've been able to... There's a lot of people that are showing up, which is a good thing.

916
01:08:11,780 --> 01:08:20,200
[CLAIRE] yeah and then Hyderabad and Bangalore and India and you know Indonesia Taiwan it's just it's

917
01:08:20,299 --> 01:08:27,380
Yeah. But like I said, there's room for more. There are places on the map that do not yet have Postgres user groups.

918
01:08:28,100 --> 01:08:29,880
So not that it...

919
01:08:29,580 --> 01:08:35,720
[JEREMY] And to me, to me personally, I think this is kind of, there's different perspectives on

920
01:08:35,779 --> 01:08:41,180
this, but to me, a user group, what that phrase means to me is something that is

921
01:08:41,540 --> 01:08:42,359
intensely local.

922
01:08:42,940 --> 01:08:48,839
And, and, to me really like it's, I think the in-person component is really important.

923
01:08:50,420 --> 01:08:52,500
But intensely local, I would say.

924
01:08:53,920 --> 01:08:57,680
And even, you mentioned getting listed on the Postgres website.

925
01:08:58,460 --> 01:08:59,480
That's a good thing to do.

926
01:09:00,400 --> 01:09:05,880
But I don't know, to me, what sets user groups aside from, say, a regional PGDay conference,

927
01:09:06,120 --> 01:09:11,640
for example, is that a user group is just intensely local to your city and to maybe the

928
01:09:11,859 --> 01:09:12,779
greater Seattle area.

929
01:09:12,839 --> 01:09:20,520
So if you live in Chicago and you're starting, well, Hettie runs a Chicago Postgres user group,

930
01:09:21,020 --> 01:09:25,040
but you want to figure out how does the tech community in Chicago communicate?

931
01:09:25,779 --> 01:09:30,500
And here in Seattle, I've spent time trying to figure out how does the Seattle tech community,

932
01:09:31,520 --> 01:09:35,240
and I've found there's a couple places, I can't remember the name of them off the top of my head,

933
01:09:35,240 --> 01:09:40,659
but there's a couple places where just Seattle tech organizations that post announcements and

934
01:09:40,680 --> 01:09:45,080
things. And I'll try to make sure to get our user group listed in the Seattle thing, because my goal

935
01:09:45,120 --> 01:09:55,600
is to make it feel like a Seattle user group, you know? Yeah.

936
01:09:47,220 --> 01:09:47,600
[CLAIRE] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

937
01:09:48,779 --> 01:09:54,000
Getting listed on the PostgreSQL.org page is not going to drive attendance at your local

938
01:09:54,299 --> 01:09:55,380
event, for sure.

939
01:09:55,700 --> 01:10:01,300
It's useful for when someone's looking at global participation in the project, right?

940
01:10:01,380 --> 01:10:05,660
Or someone's going to be, let's say a speaker is going to be traveling to a particular country

941
01:10:06,220 --> 01:10:09,820
and they're like, oh, I wonder if there's a local user group meeting that I can attend.

942
01:10:10,560 --> 01:10:12,320
That's when it's super useful, right?

943
01:10:12,460 --> 01:10:14,380
To get those opportunistic connections.

944
01:10:13,230 --> 01:10:13,440
[JEREMY] Yes.

945
01:10:15,200 --> 01:10:15,600
[CLAIRE] But yeah.

946
01:10:16,900 --> 01:10:20,700
So there's something I promised myself that I would ask you about.

947
01:10:20,780 --> 01:10:24,940
and it contrasts to your intensely local comment,

948
01:10:25,520 --> 01:10:27,700
which is a virtual conference,

949
01:10:28,460 --> 01:10:30,700
which is not intensely local at all.

950
01:10:30,700 --> 01:10:32,000
It is the opposite of that.

951
01:10:32,420 --> 01:10:34,880
But I know that you're going to be a speaker this year

952
01:10:35,180 --> 01:10:37,280
in an event for Postgres,

953
01:10:37,860 --> 01:10:39,660
which is in its fifth year,

954
01:10:39,890 --> 01:10:42,480
happens once a year, completely virtual.

955
01:10:43,540 --> 01:10:44,620
And I, of course,

956
01:10:44,890 --> 01:10:48,480
am one of the organizers of this conference,

957
01:10:49,020 --> 01:10:53,860
so definitely have some skin in the game and some bias and whatever. But I just want to give a shout

958
01:10:53,860 --> 01:11:00,000
out to the fact that you are going to be giving a talk. It's called Quorum-based Consistency for

959
01:11:00,280 --> 01:11:07,980
Cluster Changes with CloudNativePG. And you're co-presenting that with Leonardo Cecchi. I think

960
01:11:07,980 --> 01:11:13,500
I pronounced his name. It could be Chechi. I'm not sure. [Yes.] Huh. Okay. Next time I talk to Leonardo,

961
01:11:13,520 --> 01:11:15,700
I will find out how to pronounce his name.

962
01:11:16,800 --> 01:11:17,580
But I don't know.

963
01:11:19,360 --> 01:11:21,680
Why should someone attend that talk?

964
01:11:22,300 --> 01:11:23,640
What's going to be interesting about it?

965
01:11:22,620 --> 01:11:25,260
[JEREMY] Well, first of all, quick shout out.

966
01:11:25,530 --> 01:11:31,520
I remember you actually asking me a year ago, just kind of poking me at some point, being

967
01:11:31,520 --> 01:11:33,120
Hey, you should submit a talk for POSETTE.

968
01:11:34,420 --> 01:11:38,960
It's the same as with all things with user group organizers.

969
01:11:39,400 --> 01:11:41,780
It's good to send those pings out and to encourage.

970
01:11:41,900 --> 01:11:43,960
Somebody pinged me up about going to Vancouver.

971
01:11:44,200 --> 01:11:46,660
And so, yes, I finally submitted this year.

972
01:11:48,130 --> 01:11:49,520
But it makes a difference.

973
01:11:50,550 --> 01:11:51,680
I think all of us can do this.

974
01:11:51,800 --> 01:11:54,380
Just like the people that you know, send them a note every now and then.

975
01:11:54,410 --> 01:11:56,140
Hey, you should submit to such and such conference.

976
01:11:56,330 --> 01:11:58,320
Even if you don't think they're going to do it, because you never know.

977
01:11:58,620 --> 01:12:01,380
If you say it this year, maybe next year they'll do it or the year after.

978
01:12:02,000 --> 01:12:03,820
It's good to give people those nudges.

979
01:12:03,940 --> 01:12:04,580
All of us should do that.

980
01:12:04,690 --> 01:12:05,820
So thank you for the nudge.

981
01:12:07,000 --> 01:12:10,960
Thank you for nudging me a couple of times and other people who have given me nudges.

982
01:12:11,100 --> 01:12:11,720
Thank you to all of you.

983
01:12:11,770 --> 01:12:13,740
It did kind of finally convince me this year.

984
01:12:13,860 --> 01:12:14,900
I'm so glad that I did.

985
01:12:16,240 --> 01:12:17,980
It was a really cool experience.

986
01:12:18,900 --> 01:12:25,400
And so it, well, and I don't know, the whole thing has been, I'm sure will continue to be

987
01:12:25,400 --> 01:12:25,880
a cool experience.

988
01:12:27,100 --> 01:12:32,960
The POSETTE conference for listeners who aren't aware, you actually, as speakers even, we're

989
01:12:32,980 --> 01:12:37,220
working on this in the months leading up to it, it's not just like everything happens on the day

990
01:12:37,320 --> 01:12:43,560
of the event, right? So yeah, it's an amazing team. It's been a really cool experience already,

991
01:12:44,110 --> 01:12:47,180
and it hasn't even happened yet. So I'm pretty excited.

992
01:12:46,040 --> 01:12:48,100
[CLAIRE] Yeah, so your talk has already been recorded.

993
01:12:48,940 --> 01:12:58,280
The captions have already been developed and fully QA'd, so the words are actually spelled correctly, and it'll be useful.

994
01:12:58,500 --> 01:13:05,300
And I think the next step is for those captions to get translated into 16 different languages later this week. [You're kidding.]

995
01:13:06,100 --> 01:13:06,280
No.

996
01:13:06,180 --> 01:13:07,800
[JEREMY] They translate the captions too, that's amazing.

997
01:13:08,520 --> 01:13:17,420
[CLAIRE] So the English, there's more effort into the baseline captioning, and then the translations are all done with technology.

998
01:13:16,520 --> 01:13:17,360
[JEREMY] I didn't even know about that. I keep learning every week there's something new about POSETTE Where I'm like, you're kidding, you do that too.

999
01:13:17,600 --> 01:13:28,260
[CLAIRE] They're not done. Yeah. People, people watch these. I mean, actually on YouTube these days,

1000
01:13:28,390 --> 01:13:34,940
I think anybody can go into a video and request for machine generated translations into

1001
01:13:35,100 --> 01:13:41,980
different languages. So anyway, the point is, yeah, a lot of your prep has been done. Next week,

1002
01:13:42,040 --> 01:13:44,680
when the event happens between June 16 through 18,

1003
01:13:46,080 --> 01:13:49,400
most of the speakers are going to be present on the Discord, right,

1004
01:13:49,720 --> 01:13:52,140
for the virtual hallway track to answer people's questions

1005
01:13:52,370 --> 01:13:53,980
and be part of the conversation.

1006
01:13:52,940 --> 01:13:53,840
[JEREMY] I'm looking forward to it.

1007
01:13:54,570 --> 01:13:55,920
[CLAIRE] And that happens during.

1008
01:13:56,070 --> 01:14:00,640
And then, of course, afterwards, the talks are immediately made public on YouTube

1009
01:14:00,870 --> 01:14:03,000
so people can watch them at their leisure as well.

1010
01:14:04,739 --> 01:14:07,380
Or as Melanie Plageman sometimes does,

1011
01:14:07,570 --> 01:14:09,620
they can listen to them while they're out for a run

1012
01:14:09,980 --> 01:14:13,820
so they can be exercising and learning at the same time. [Nice.]

1013
01:14:15,540 --> 01:14:20,440
But yeah, I'm so, I have not watched your talk yet with you and Leonardo.

1014
01:14:21,180 --> 01:14:22,220
So I'm looking forward to it.

1015
01:14:24,200 --> 01:14:26,840
So glad that the nudge worked this time. [Nice.]

1016
01:14:29,560 --> 01:14:32,400
Is there, is there anything?

1017
01:14:32,640 --> 01:14:33,140
I don't know.

1018
01:14:33,160 --> 01:14:35,500
You probably haven't even had a chance to prepare yet.

1019
01:14:35,520 --> 01:14:40,080
for me, my preparation in terms of looking at the schedule and deciding what I'm going to attend

1020
01:14:40,540 --> 01:14:46,700
is usually the day before. But I know other people who plan out what they're going to

1021
01:14:47,480 --> 01:14:50,940
be there for weeks in advance. What kind of person are you, Jeremy?

1022
01:14:52,700 --> 01:14:54,320
[JEREMY] What do you mean? With the session for the Discord?

1023
01:14:55,100 --> 01:14:57,900
[CLAIRE] No, no, no. Well, also deciding what other talks you might be

1024
01:14:58,760 --> 01:15:02,840
paying attention to or participating in or attending. Is that something that you plan for,

1025
01:15:01,700 --> 01:15:02,680
[JEREMY] Oh, with POSETTE in general.

1026
01:15:03,180 --> 01:15:11,340
[CLAIRE] Yeah. Way in advance or the day before. Okay. All right. Got it. All right. So I won't put you on the spot to ask you to shout out to things.

1027
01:15:06,080 --> 01:15:06,780
[JEREMY] It's going to be the day before.

1028
01:15:08,240 --> 01:15:09,480
Last minute, probably.

1029
01:15:15,540 --> 01:15:16,480
Oh, no. Yeah.

1030
01:15:17,420 --> 01:15:21,820
The whole lineup looks really good, but I haven't figured out which ones I might go to yet.

1031
01:15:26,580 --> 01:15:33,980
[CLAIRE] Okay, I got it. All right. So if anybody, is listening to this and either lives in or plans any business trips or recreational trips or

1032
01:15:33,990 --> 01:15:41,300
whatever to Seattle in the foreseeable future, it's called the Seattle Postgres user group.

1033
01:15:42,260 --> 01:15:49,340
And they have a main page on meetup.com. And what's also cool there is you can not just see

1034
01:15:49,520 --> 01:15:55,300
what's coming up, but you can also get a peek into all of the past user groups. You can see who the

1035
01:15:55,320 --> 01:16:01,420
speakers were, what they talked about. It's actually a pretty nice lineup. You guys have

1036
01:16:01,440 --> 01:16:06,380
done a good job attracting speakers. Look at that. Chelsea Dole is on there too.

1037
01:16:04,440 --> 01:16:04,720
[JEREMY] Thank you.

1038
01:16:05,590 --> 01:16:10,900
And two more things to add.

1039
01:16:11,880 --> 01:16:16,760
Number one, there's also we have a YouTube site where I'm currently about six months behind,

1040
01:16:17,520 --> 01:16:20,300
but many of our talks have been posted to YouTube.

1041
01:16:21,960 --> 01:16:25,160
And the second thing is you mentioned if people are visiting Seattle.

1042
01:16:25,670 --> 01:16:30,980
So the user group, our schedule is that we almost always meet on the first Thursday of

1043
01:16:30,980 --> 01:16:31,300
the month.

1044
01:16:31,430 --> 01:16:32,400
So it's very easy to remember.

1045
01:16:32,920 --> 01:16:35,180
If you're in Seattle and it's the first week of the month, look us up.

1046
01:16:36,500 --> 01:16:43,100
But secondly, if anybody, anybody who has any interest in Postgres is visiting Seattle, it

1047
01:16:43,220 --> 01:16:44,880
doesn't matter what week of the month it is.

1048
01:16:45,050 --> 01:16:47,440
Send us a note, me or Lloyd or anybody.

1049
01:16:48,120 --> 01:16:50,340
We have been known to have impromptu.

1050
01:16:50,480 --> 01:16:54,000
I've, if you even look at the meetup, there was one time I remember Álvaro was visiting

1051
01:16:54,560 --> 01:16:56,620
from Spain and I was just like, oh man, he's coming.

1052
01:16:56,780 --> 01:16:59,520
We're going to just post a, we're just having an impromptu lunch.

1053
01:16:59,800 --> 01:17:00,920
Anybody who wants to show up.

1054
01:17:00,970 --> 01:17:05,380
And there was about six people that just kind of came and we all had lunch together because

1055
01:17:05,380 --> 01:17:07,440
he was visiting out of town and he's a Postgres guy, right?

1056
01:17:07,920 --> 01:17:10,080
So anybody who's visiting town, send us a note.

1057
01:17:10,240 --> 01:17:14,780
It's really fun to connect with people who share this interest in Postgres.

1058
01:17:15,340 --> 01:17:17,920
And I think that a lot of folks in the user group enjoy that.

1059
01:17:19,400 --> 01:17:26,180
[CLAIRE] Well, and I know from the attendance, for example, at the session that Cornelia and Andreas did at

1060
01:17:26,480 --> 01:17:32,340
PGConf.dev, people who do run user groups also like to talk to each other, to share tips or

1061
01:17:32,440 --> 01:17:37,900
get ideas or say, well, I've been having trouble with this. And so that's a nice kind of collaboration.

1062
01:17:38,310 --> 01:17:43,480
And if you do co-organize a user group, it's another way for you to meet people, right? Because

1063
01:17:43,680 --> 01:17:47,440
people who are running other ones in other countries or cities or whatever are going to

1064
01:17:47,580 --> 01:17:52,600
want to talk to you. So that's another way that your network can kind of expand even beyond the

1065
01:17:52,700 --> 01:18:02,540
local. So Jeremy, thank you so much for being on the show today. When I first asked you,

1066
01:18:03,020 --> 01:18:08,220
you said yes someday. [Yep.] I don't think you said, well, you didn't say no. And I don't think you

1067
01:18:08,380 --> 01:18:14,600
said maybe, but it was clear that we weren't going to commit to a date in that first conversation.

1068
01:18:15,140 --> 01:18:20,540
So I'm so glad that we got to a date and that you're here and that you got to share your origin

1069
01:18:20,540 --> 01:18:29,200
story as well as all of your philosophies about these local user groups. [All of my philosophies.] And it sounds like it's,

1070
01:18:29,480 --> 01:18:35,560
I don't know, it definitely has affected your career, where you live, your life. I mean,

1071
01:18:35,660 --> 01:18:37,840
that's kind of cool.

1072
01:18:37,680 --> 01:18:39,620
[JEREMY] There aren't right answers for a lot of these things.

1073
01:18:39,840 --> 01:18:41,980
I, you know, I've, I don't know.

1074
01:18:42,150 --> 01:18:43,120
I enjoy doing it.

1075
01:18:43,340 --> 01:18:45,900
It's, it's, like I said, I feel sort of lucky.

1076
01:18:46,060 --> 01:18:49,400
I'm doing the best I can here in Seattle, but I know that I do things differently.

1077
01:18:50,200 --> 01:18:54,960
There are little things we might do slightly differently than other user group organizers

1078
01:18:55,260 --> 01:18:55,320
do.

1079
01:18:56,980 --> 01:18:57,720
We make it work.

1080
01:18:58,900 --> 01:18:59,000
[CLAIRE] So, okay.

1081
01:18:59,590 --> 01:19:05,400
Well, I am sending you a big, big thank you from down here in California.

1082
01:19:05,440 --> 01:19:09,920
And I want to say thank you to Jeremy Schneider for joining us today.

1083
01:19:10,180 --> 01:19:15,240
And for those of you listening, if you like today's episode and you want to hear more of

1084
01:19:15,360 --> 01:19:21,220
these Talking Postgres episodes, you should subscribe on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever

1085
01:19:21,220 --> 01:19:22,240
you get your podcasts.

1086
01:19:22,520 --> 01:19:27,160
And please tell your friends, because word of mouth is gold in the podcast world.

1087
01:19:28,260 --> 01:19:34,000
You can get to past episodes and get links to subscribe on the different platforms by going

1088
01:19:34,020 --> 01:19:35,740
to TalkingPostgres.com.

1089
01:19:36,170 --> 01:19:37,920
And you'll find transcripts included

1090
01:19:38,260 --> 01:19:41,080
on the episode pages on TalkingPostgres.com too.

1091
01:19:41,860 --> 01:19:43,060
And a big thank you to everybody

1092
01:19:43,190 --> 01:19:44,460
who joined the live recording

1093
01:19:44,940 --> 01:19:48,120
and participated in the live text chat on Discord.