Nikolay: Hello, hello.
This is PostgresFM.
I don't remember episode number.
Michael: 74.
Nikolay: Thank you, Michael.
This is Michael, by the way, and my name is Nikolay, as usual.
Only once we had a guest, right?
Maybe it's time to invite more, but it's a different story.
So, this is PostgresFM and we do it since summer 2022, not skipping
any weeks and I'm still surprised that we didn't skip any weeks.
It's good.
And today this topic was again suggested from outside.
We didn't invent it, right?
Michael: Yeah, I chose or insisted on this topic this week.
We're going to go along with the monthly blogging event, PGSQL
Phriday.
Pavlo from Cybertec has suggested the topic events or Postgres
events more specifically.
Nikolay: Not event queue, right?
No, not events.
Michael: No, in-person conferences, online events.
This quite broad topic and we could go in any direction you want
with this.
I've got a few things I'd love to talk about and ask you questions
about. You've hosted meetups in the past.
We've mentioned it briefly on the podcast before.
So yeah, I'd love to get your perspective from an organization
point of view as well.
But yeah, speaking, we've both spoken at in-person and online
events, both attended and listened to people's talks.
So yeah.
Nikolay: Yeah, this is an interesting area, which I have a very opinionated
point of view on this topic and I think for me it started back
to 2006-2007, actually earlier.
So offline events are fun, They are good, but I don't look at
them the same anymore.
And this is funny, right now we have an AWS huge event happening,
many Postgres folks are there,
Michael: right? Re:Invent.
Nikolay: Re:Invent, yeah, they just announced Limitless Aurora
with Postgres support first and MySQL coming later.
Yeah.
And people are already joking about limitless bills, right?
See?
I haven't
Michael: seen that.
That's great.
Nikolay: Yep.
See, I have all news not coming there, right?
For knowledge, we don't need to go anywhere anymore because the
Internet is delivering knowledge better.
I observe also hybrid approach when we go to offline event, but
you consume knowledge mostly through computer being at offline
event.
Offline event is good to meet people, right?
But I think, I still think there should be some new type of event
invented to support human meetings, you know, just for like collaborations,
so not in the form of sharing knowledge like 1 guy on stage with
slide deck, because I think, like it's my opinion, but let's
start from the past and maybe by the end of this podcast, some
people will understand me better.
I know not everyone will agree with me and I also enjoy meeting
with people in person.
But for knowledge it's not efficient.
This is my position anymore.
And meetups are kind of dead almost, unfortunately.
There are some meetups, well, golden era of meetups is behind
us, unfortunately.
When, you know, like 200 people came and company hosting says,
we don't have coffee break supplies anymore, let's close registration.
I say, forget about coffee, let's bring more people.
They're coming, coming because of Postgres's popularity.
It happened many years ago.
So, where to start?
Michael: Well, you mentioned '06, '07 as a specific point for you.
What was happening then?
Nikolay: It was actually the first event, the first serious event for
me was when I was speaking.
It was actually, it was about databases but not about PostgreSQL.
And I was presenting some, I don't remember, maybe my master
thesis materials in Kyiv, Ukraine, actually.
It was some scientific conference, actually.
It's kind of, not scientific, academic conference.
Yeah, it was kind of fun to come there to speak.
It was very long ago, 2005, maybe '04 even.
So, yeah.
Then 2007 was a turning point for Russia and that part of the world
when somehow a few things started to happen.
First of all, I chose Postgres in 2006, and then I participated
a little bit in XML development and visited PGCon in 2007.
And in the same year, 2007, we started, not we, one guy actually
started HighLoad conference in Russia.
His name is Oleg.
Oleg Bunin And another Oleg, Bartonov, I also met him around that
time because Oleg Bartonov is, you know, like Teodor Sigaev and
then Alexander Korotkov, these are big Russian names.
Maybe after Vadim Mikheev, who was before them, working on WAL.
These guys worked on full-text search, GIN indexes, GiST indexes,
A lot of such stuff related to performance and how we retrieve
data faster.
And so it was happening very fast in 2007.
I also had my first startup and I used Postgres a lot.
And then this conference series started, High Load.
And since I just visited PGCon, I immediately invited Bruce Momjian.
Michael: For anybody that doesn't know, PGCon is or was hosted
in Canada yearly and is very Postgres developer-centric, I believe.
So for people working on the Postgres internals itself, it's
probably the best conference each year for them, would you say?
Nikolay: It's not kind of best, but it was the first in 2006,
so I visited the second one in 2007 in Ottawa, and this year I
visited the last one, so no more PGCon, unfortunately.
Michael: But isn't it being taken over by new people?
Nikolay: Yeah.
Dan, who was the organizer of PGCon, said that the successor
of it will be in Vancouver, I guess, next year.
And a different set of people will be organizing, and the name
will be changed to PGConf something, I don't remember.
But anyway, my decision right now, I'm on the stage, like we're
jumping between past and current and trade side.
For me, I said no more offline events for a couple of years.
I don't see the point.
Last three events were terrible in terms of efficiency for me.
And well, I'm not complaining.
I just, this is my position.
I prefer sharing knowledge online right now and consuming and
learning online.
I still miss meeting some people, but I can organize it separately.
So this is my vision.
So back to 2007, we started again, not we, I just was like a
member of committee from the beginning, responsible for the database
topic, and I invited Bruce Momjian right away because I just met
him in Ottawa.
So he visited Moscow, and since then he visited many, many times,
High Load.
And at the same time, one guy and I, we were working on our startup
together.
We started a meetup in also 2007, 2008.
In Moscow, we were a Russian user group.
I later renamed it from Postgres Russia to RuPostgres when I realized
that half of people speaking Russian are outside Russia.
So it became RuPostgres.
And this story continued for me with some ups and downs till
2022, February 24, when the war started, like the war started
earlier in 2014, but a new phase invasion started, and we had
a disagreement internally because my position always was you cannot
split completely politics from regular work and we need to be
careful.
The main organizer and the absolute majority of program committee
were against me and we didn't agree that like they started to
delete my messages internally.
Michael: Sorry to hear that, yeah.
Nikolay: And I exited the program committee like a few days after
the war started.
So but anyway, the experience I had running these meetups offline,
again, up to a couple of hundred people, it's huge.
It was insane, like 2015, maybe 16, when Postgres popularity
started to grow significantly.
Michael: So were these 1 day events?
Were they evening events like meetup type things?
Nikolay: It never was more than 3 hours.
And sometimes I combined a couple of topics, 3 topics.
The actually let's cover a few like 2008 we had very interesting
event.
It was recorded again in Moscow.
After that, I was so exhausted because I thought I'm a very bad
organizer and I don't understand technical details and like I
cannot do it anymore.
But later people, many years later people watched this recording
and said, oh, this was a real amazing event.
What I did, I invited 3 guys from the Postgres community and 3 guys
from the MySQL community, including Peter Zaitsev.
And we had kind of battle, Postgres versus MySQL.
That was fun.
But I was exhausted.
After that, I took a break, like a couple of years, no events,
and then only relaunched it.
Not a couple, many years of break.
Then I watched how Josh Berkus is running meetups in San Francisco,
and I realized that it can be kind of interesting again.
And then I returned to Moscow for like a few months.
Then I started visiting, it was like, due to work and life reasons.
It was already after the invasion of Crimea, but complicated things.
But I relaunched meetups there and immediately got huge attention
after many years of...
You know, like before 2014-15 Postgres was like kind of an outsider.
It was like you need to prove why you choose it because it's
complicated, it's hard to maintain and so on.
It's still hard to maintain, that's why RDS and others have their
value delivery, maintenance headache is solved.
But in 2014-15, probably because not only because of JSON, I
think also because of RDS, popularity started to grow.
Yes, yes.
And I felt like, you know, like this, I need to choose some,
you know, how to organize meetup once again.
Well, I have some connections.
I just ask some people who work at big companies, can you host?
They are ready to host because, you know, they want to compete
and show how good their offices are, you know, because for them it's
advertising for HR purposes.
Michael: Anybody hiring is a really good way of showing off.
Nikolay: Yeah, yes, exactly.
And you can just use it if you want to organize.
Currently, the situation is different because of COVID and remote-focused
companies.
This is another reason why my Postgres meetups are declining.
We can discuss it a little bit later.
So what happened, I decided, okay, it will be Yandex.
And I said, okay, how many people?
They said, okay, maximum 80 people maybe.
I said, okay.
And then they quickly asked me to close registration because
out of, you know, coffee cups or something like I said, coffee,
it's not needed.
Like we can do without coffee, you know.
And then they asked a question I could not forget they said this
is your event of course but can we like grab like 10 minutes
and also present something that will be about Postgres. I said,
well, of course, what will it be?
They said, this is how we migrated the Yandex.Mail from Oracle
to Postgres.
I started to feel like, wow, this should be not 10 minutes only.
And then Vladimir Borodin, who hired Andrei Borodin later, which
is interesting, just coincidence, last names the same.
And then they presented it at PGCon later, like it was huge migration
from Oracle to Postgres, and the reasons were interesting, solutions
were interesting, like super interesting topic.
So I found the gem right away, just trying to come to a big company
and use their facilities to host meetup.
And then I remember, in the first row I saw new faces and then these
new faces became kind of almost like friends for me in the following
years because these guys worked at large companies, large e-commerce
companies and so on.
And all of them used Postgres.
I was like, wow, Postgres is different now.
This return was super successful.
So I have good memories.
But unfortunately, of course, like this political situation and
so on, like I hate this, like we are divided right now and some
people work at companies I don't appreciate.
Not only appreciate, I consider like kind of enemies already
because if a company has some, any connections with the military
Russia, this is an enemy for me.
Michael: Yeah, I think your cat agrees.
Nikolay: Yes, unfortunately, it's sad but like anyway, this was
a cat experience.
We had at some point like a couple of hundred people.
And you know, like,
Michael: Yeah, that's a serious turnout.
Like I went to a recent London PG day, which is so we have post,
we have conferences in the Postgres world and obviously language
specific ones that include some Postgres talks.
But we also have these PG days that tend to be 1 day events full
day, not just 3 hours, kind of like 6, 7, 8 hours full of talks as
well.
So maybe even 6, 7, 8 talks.
And it's London, right?
Like this is a hub for the UK and possible to get to from quite
a lot of other places in Europe quite easily.
And I think we had fewer than 100 attendees.
It was a good turnout, but 200 people for a three-hour event
is a serious turnout.
Nikolay: It also depends on channels you use
to attract people.
But I honestly think the golden era was when Postgres community
population started to grow, like 15, 16, 17, 18, these years.
Now it's declining and people don't see big value coming to offline
events because, you know, the problem with knowledge consumption,
like learning at offline event, Of course, it's good you can
ask your question definitely, but honestly, you can ask a question
in a follow-up under YouTube right now and we will try to answer
as well, but in a synchronous format.
But the problem is if you miss something, you cannot rewind.
This is problem number 1.
The second problem if it's boring you cannot speed it up.
For example, or skip.
Right now I'm talking quite slowly, so you can probably use 1.5
speed to still understand me, right?
This is efficiency, right?
And also tickets cost a lot, right?
Usually.
Like, okay, if it's the same town, okay, it's good.
But yeah.
Michael: That's a good point.
It wasn't free as well.
So I'm guessing your meetup was free for attendees?
Nikolay: Always free.
Michael: That's a big difference.
I would say though I think there are these differences and I would say that meeting people
and connections that you make are really interesting.
It doesn't always happen in person events, but I've noticed when
you're involved in some capacity, like as a speaker, I found
people approached me and it was a much better level of conversation
with people when I was a speaker than attendee to attendee type
conversations.
Like it's not always difficult to have good conversations, but
yeah, I found as a speaker, it definitely helped.
Nikolay: Some online events which happen synchronously about
recording and then the ability to asynchronously rewatch or watch
what you missed.
Some events try to have formats like moving the speaker and people
who are interested in a separate room or virtual room and then
you can spend time asking questions and so on.
Actually, honestly, with online events, it's also sometimes good,
sometimes bad.
Like I had, for example, a couple of hours event when more than
500 people watched me.
The key here is that the Postgres community, the core Postgres community
is quite small.
And if you want more people, you need to reach backend developers,
like analyst people and others, like maybe even frontend developers
and so on.
In this case, it can be huge.
But if you're just targeting the same people all the time, it
won't grow fast, I think.
But the quality of questions will be also different in this case,
right?
Michael: Well, there are big Postgres-only events.
The one in Europe I went to, the one last year, we both, that's the
one time we've met in person actually.
That was over 600 people at one event, but it was 3 or 4 simultaneous
tracks.
So it wasn't 600 people watching every talk or watching one talk.
It was split across multiple tracks.
And then, so it was jam-packed.
In fact, I was on the program committee for that, which was a
lot of work.
In fact, we can cover that a little bit.
I think it might be interesting to people how those work.
But my point for that was it was stacked each.
It was multiple days, 3 or 4 days of 3 or 4 tracks of talks with
breaks with coffee breaks and lunch breaks, but no
kind of like nothing else, no other structure around meeting
people.
And then I've heard this phrase, is it the hallway track people
call it?
So skipping the odd talk, sometimes it's good to skip just for
a break and maybe if you run a business, maybe check your emails,
or if you're still working, if you're on call, that kind of thing,
just check in.
Or just go for a walk.
But the alternative is to hang around and chat with other people that
are skipping a talk.
Nikolay: Right.
If you know the area in general, the field in general, probably
even if you attend offline, what I think all speakers and conference
organizers, event organizers should do is collect...
Collecting slide decks in advance doesn't work, because a lot
of people, including myself, prepare them until the last minute.
But there should be a way to distribute SlideDecks, the finalized
version, right away online.
Like when the talk is started, SlideDeck is ready for sure.
So this version should be distributed.
It's a simple thing, but even organizers fail here often.
They try to tell me, oh, you need to send me your slide deck 2 weeks
in advance.
I have done it many times.
I never did.
And they cannot do anything with it.
It's not possible.
Because there is no slide deck yet.
But in the last minute, they should collect and distribute because
others who probably are attending another track or they're just working,
as you said, right?
When I attend the events, I usually give my talk and I never
attend anything, honestly.
But it's just not efficient.
I cannot sit for 1 hour and listen to this thing of which 80% I understand
just from slides.
It's not efficient.
I want to look at slides quickly and then probably talk to this
guy directly.
Well, sometimes it works, sometimes it's interesting, but not
often at all.
Well, I mean, my situation is probably different because at the
same time I found myself attending person-to-person rehearsals
or PostgresFM open talk series, and there I enjoy, I can spend
1 hour diving deep and so on.
But regular talks, very often I just see like this I know, this
I know, this I know.
And it's like, I would just rather look at slides and catch you
later in the hall, right?
Michael: Yeah, I don't think you're...
to discuss some deep...
I think you're atypical here because you probably know the contents
like it.
Most good talks start with like some introductory stuff for people
that don't know the topic well, that's almost never going to
be useful for you. But it's really useful for other people and
I personally probably have a higher tolerance for watching these
talks live partly because I know less and partly because I think
there's this every now and again there's a throwaway comment
that the speaker probably didn't even plan to say but just happened
to come to their mind during the talk that's not in the slides,
that is the most interesting thing to me about that talk.
And sometimes 55 minutes of a talk were not useful, but the 5
minutes that were, were so helpful to me that it was worth it.
So I think there's...
Nikolay: I agree here.
And if a speaker says, like, you can interrupt me anytime, I
usually also do it.
And this is good.
Why does
Michael: that not surprise me?
Nikolay: Probably, yeah.
Probably we can just cover some additional, like, deep, narrow
topic during the talk.
It can be interesting, I agree here.
But anyway, I think flexibility should be good here.
People who want to watch it fully in person, okay.
People who want to watch it later, because sometimes too...
HighLoad had more than 3,000 attendees and 10 tracks in parallel.
Almost always I saw some interesting materials in parallel, like
I cannot attend them if I can't walk between them, but they also
compiled everything and later, a couple of months later, you
can watch everything.
They also published books.
I remember reading these books from time to time.
You just download it.
Today it's easy.
We have a pipeline for our subtitles.
Michael: But a talk's not the same as writing a book.
It wouldn't be a very good
Nikolay: book.
There are many goals why you want to attend a talk.
Many goals.
And if it's pure knowledge, if you want to understand some other
people's experience and some just knowledge, you want to understand
some method how to do something or complexities, you probably
don't need it now, but you might need it later, like in half
a year, for example.
In this case, having a recording, having books transcribed, it's
easy again, like with AI it's super easy.
We have it, right?
In this case, this builds value, this conference delivers, right?
And I remember these books were helpful.
I was reading some MySQL talks, which I didn't attend because
I was not interested.
But now I'm interested in this topic and Postgres and I see MySQL
has something.
I remember there were talks about it.
I just read these materials with slides and text and you understand.
Then you can watch the recording if you want or you can combine.
There are many ways.
Also some people are okay with listening, some people need to
see it.
There are different people, right?
Some people want to redo, oh, I don't understand, I want to rewind.
What I'm trying to say, offline works for some, online works
also for some.
And if there is good material and a good speaker, today we
can produce many results just from 1 recording.
I mean, 1 time you explain something, and then we have all possible
variations of this knowledge and we can help people consume it
asynchronously or synchronously and in any way, like text, video,
audio, right?
Michael: I think you're right about different people having ideal
methods of learning, but I think there's also a point here about
accessibility.
And I mean, I don't mean it in the kind of technical sense.
I mean, it almost from a, like being able to afford to do things
and also being able to like traveling to events is it can be
expensive.
Staying can be expensive.
Tickets can be expensive.
And in the, at least in my experience in the Postgres world,
unlike some of the bigger language conferences, we don't tend
to pay.
I don't think I've seen any many events, if any, that pay speakers
or pay for travel or pay for a conversation.
Nikolay: How lot always do that?
Michael: That's great.
Nikolay: Not pay, but reimburse the travel costs and hotel costs
just to make it simpler to bring better speakers.
Yeah, but not just
Michael: better but also just a wider, well I guess that doesn't
imply better, does it?
If you're recruiting from a wider pool of people, that your quality
will improve.
Nikolay: PGCon also I remember that then, I mean PGCon paid me
in 2007 to go to Ottawa, and it was amazing that
I was very young and of course like lack of money obviously and
this helped me.
I always remember this.
Michael: I do apologize.
I think PGCon is the exception or was the exception.
Nikolay: Right, right.
PGCon did it.
And that's great.
I saw they did it this year again.
Actually, I could use that help.
I just didn't use it because already I can cover myself.
I don't need it.
But it was cool to see it was still happening.
And I think it's the right thing to do to help people come from
various parts of the world.
Michael: Yeah.
And with the sponsor, I think there is enough money in Postgres.
I haven't tried running an event.
I do realize it's really difficult to break even.
I think money-wise it is difficult.
But we can get
Nikolay: a lot of satisfaction from it.
It's not difficult.
It's a lot of work, but if you do it with passion, it's not super
difficult.
And there are many companies who are good sponsors, right?
For example, I don't know, like big events, like some I participated
in, 3,000 people and so on, had budgets like more than $1 million
per event.
There are many companies who are attracted.
If you go with like banks, like e-commerce, they come and you
just need to organize a lot.
This is like 24/7 work for a couple of weeks before the conference
starts and you won't be able to sleep if you need a huge event.
But it's possible.
Michael: Most of our events are still run by very hardworking
volunteers, people that aren't getting paid.
Nikolay: Right, but why we discuss this?
Once they started accepting money from companies, they should
stop saying volunteers.
They have money.
Just charge them more and that's it and deliver better quality.
Just do it or like, I don't know.
For example, here we discuss the controversial topic which I
have very strong opinion on.
If you have sponsors, you must provide recording.
At least for people who paid, right?
Otherwise, for speakers, it's not fair.
They come, they see, okay, you brought like 20 or 50 people,
but the work is so huge it's better to go to YouTube and then later
people who are interested will be able to listen and see your
material.
So of course a conference in person delivers better connections.
I had very good follow-ups, very good.
Like they said, we attended your talk, blah, blah, blah, super.
But I don't understand why I need to spend a huge effort preparing
slides.
And this happened with the last three conferences actually.
So you spend a lot of effort.
Probably you pay for your tickets and hotel to come.
How do you do it as
Michael: a speaker?
Nikolay: I mean, well, usually it's so, as we discussed.
There are exceptions, but for a Postgres community, the norm is...
I don't know.
Okay, this is PGCon 2007, that was an exception.
HighLoad, always paid.
Nobody else paid, usually.
I always come just because I'm interested in presenting, you
know.
And not anymore.
I'm not coming anymore and I can tell everyone.
Last year I had a rule, I come only if you record.
Now I just don't.
No.
I tested once recently with Jung.
Ah, it was online.
I could come to East Coast, but I decided to present online only
and I confirmed I'm not doing offline events anymore.
So what I'm trying to say is a very simple idea.
You do a lot of effort.
You have a break in your work.
Of course, if your employer pays, this is a different story,
right?
Basically, the employer bribes you here.
So like you have a vacation, you visit, it's super fun, cool,
but if we speak purely about professional efficiency like work
efficiency and so on, like effort versus result, I don't understand
any reason why this talk cannot be recorded because you did a
lot of effort and you want the result to be recorded too.
It's super annoying when you spend a lot of effort.
You came to some conference, you found even 50 people, cool.
But you understand, if it was recorded, maybe a few hundred more
from different parts of the world would watch it and tell you something
interesting, for example, or follow up, or like you would find
more like-minded thinking, right?
This is why you're presenting usually.
Michael: Several of my first, so I was late
Nikolay: for the post-question.
Recording was super expensive.
Michael: That's the normal reason, yeah.
Nikolay: I only have rude words here.
It's not a...
Michael: Can I move us?
I think you've got a point, but also it's difficult to...
All we can do is ask and see what people do.
If they can afford to...
Some conferences are now saying that these videos are sponsored
by this sponsor, so the sponsor paid the money for the recording.
So that's a way of
Nikolay: solving it.
This conference has forgotten that this is open source and we should
go low-key, like simple approach.
We all have like iPads or something and we can record on a laptop.
We don't need like high, expensive production.
Yes.
Well, it will be high quality.
The microphones are good already enough, or you can buy a $100 microphone.
It's not expensive.
$100 or $200.
The Rode, they're like this, like, how it's called, I don't remember.
This, you attach them, it's wireless, super cheap.
I mean $200, what is it?
And then you don't need to record faces at all.
All you need is just sound and slides.
Michael: Yeah, good point.
Nikolay: It can be 100% automated.
And then one guy, one student, you can pay this guy like 300 bucks
to publish these 20 talks or how many you have.
That's it.
I honestly, like, for me, it's such a deep problem.
Michael: I want to move us on, but partly to advertise something
you've been doing, which is PostgresFM's OpenTalk series on YouTube.
So if any speakers out there, I know reaching out to them is
quite a lot of work, but if any speakers out there have given
a talk that they wish was recorded or was at an event that wasn't
able to record for some reason, you'll have them on to the YouTube
channel to present and ask a couple of questions.
And I think that's a really great service.
So if anybody wants to reach out, that would be awesome.
We can add to that series.
Nikolay: Yes, thank you.
Indeed, I did it last in this year a little bit.
I don't know, like maybe 10 or 15 talks.
But I found like I don't have the capacity for inviting people, but
if someone is interested and this is a very interesting material,
definitely I will be happy to do it.
Because for me, it's actually zero overhead except one hour or how
much time do we need.
We do it online, nothing like no special production at all.
And now we have a beautiful workflow, or how is it called, pipelines,
that delivers very good quality subtitles.
We have it, and it's super cheap and super fast, and the quality
is super good.
I enjoy it.
Last time I said, in the previous episode I said, "begin except"
blocks because I spent too much time with Python recently.
And this pipeline, because it's based on Whisper and GPT-4 Turbo
models, APIs from OpenAI.
It corrected me and in subtitles you have "begin exception" as
it should be.
So it's a good example, but it's very gentle correcting.
So with most corrections, usually when you write a book, for
example, and the corrector starts to bring some stupid corrections,
you know, like you stop it, don't do it.
Here it's very gentle and just uses the list of terms we've built
and extend from time to time.
And optionally we can have an article or blog post out of that.
Talk also.
It would require some additional effort, but I think it makes
sense if it's an interesting material we can redo the talk if
it was not recorded at some conference and then we can also have
a blog post out of it with very low effort.
Michael: If people want, right?
Nikolay: Yeah, if they want to.
If anyone listening to this is also an event organizer, I also
offer to cooperate here.
I can share.
It's not rocket science.
It's just AI.
Oh, nice.
If you have some recordings already, we can ask authors if they
are okay with it.
By the way, with my talks, I usually give in Russian, in the
past, there's a guy who just enjoyed doing it and just publishing
these posts, transforming recordings from YouTube to a good blog
post which was discussed on some platform.
He was just enjoying, like he was trying to find good materials
and then publish a good article.
It's like translation, but not from English to some language,
but it's translation from video audio to text because many people
are better consuming texts.
So we can do it if you have a lot of video recordings of recent
events, we can transcribe them and create blog posts out of it.
Michael: Or just get better subtitles, right?
Like the subtitles alone are great.
Nikolay: Subtitles can be improved or I still think if you had
a good event, you have a good opportunity to reach out to a wider
audience if you convert it to text.
It's text with pictures from slides.
Illustrations.
So step by step.
And it's quite easy to read.
I also enjoy reading such like transcoded talks.
Maybe sometimes better than watching full video because...
Michael: Well, much more skimmable.
Nikolay: Yeah, skim through is the keyword here.
Michael: The thing I wanted to share about the, like for anybody
out there considering submitting talks to conferences, there
were a couple of things that surprised me being on a selection
committee.
One was that experienced speakers often submit multiple talks to
the same, multiple abstracts to the same event.
That shocked me.
It never occurred to me to submit multiple.
I thought I've got this one idea for a talk, I'm gonna submit that.
But the problem is as a selection committee, you don't really
want to talk of a similar topic at
Nikolay: the same
Michael: event.
So you happen to submit a talk to the same event as maybe the
world expert on that specific topic.
Nikolay: Yeah, fun story related to this.
I also usually submit multiple because I know that this increases
my conversion.
You submit, you want something to be selected.
If it's a narrow topic, maybe the program committee doesn't find
it interesting for the audience of this conference.
So you submit multiple, because you have materials or pre-materials,
like maybe you already tried some of them at some meetups for example,
or maybe you have a new version of an old talk with better details,
like recently with DjangoCon, which I presented online, It was
my seamless SQL optimization tutorial, like a three-hour tutorial,
like insane.
But it was version 3 already of this talk and they selected it,
although I submitted I think 5 materials as I usually do.
Yeah, it's just experienced speakers usually have a lot of materials.
Bruce Momjian usually says, check my website, brucemomjian.us,
I don't know, talks.
There are updated talks, there are new talks.
You just select what you want.
This is what most experienced people do.
But let me tell you a short funny story.
During COVID, I actually decided to return to PGCon in 2019-20,
but I wanted to visit Ottawa once again.
And I did it this year, but previous years due to COVID it was
fully online, unfortunately.
So I was selected in 2020 And then they selected both my tutorial
and some talk.
And then I remember during online session, Dan administrated everything,
like he was managing a lot of computers.
And then I remember I connect to my second talk and Dan says,
oh, like off of recording, he says, oh, you again?
Like I said, yes, I was.
2 talks were selected.
He said, it should not happen.
We have a rule to select only 1.
We need to fix the SQL which guarantees maybe a wrong group by, you
know, Michael: or something.
Nikolay: Constraint.
Yeah, constraint.
Lack of constraint, I guess.
I guess I hacked it and it should not be so.
Michael: Probably a mistake by the committee, but that's a good
point.
Nikolay: No, no, no, no.
He mentioned that technically it shouldn't be possible because
the talks are obviously stored in Postgres.
And when they select, they select trying to have only 1 talk
per speaker.
So I guess it's a bug or SQL and it should be fixed.
That's it.
But not anymore.
No more this event, unfortunately.
Michael: Well yes, so you're talking about kind of from an experienced
speaker perspective, but I'm talking about new speakers, people
that don't have experience doing this, try and come up with a
second one.
No, no, no, so as a
Nikolay: speaker,
Michael: as a new speaker, and I would encourage people to try
it out because I think it can seriously improve your like the
number of connections you make at an event or it definitely helped
my confidence talking to people at events for some reason.
I did actually also want to make an offer to anybody that hasn't
ever spoken at a Postgres event before, I know it can be daunting
and practice is really helpful.
If you want to practice in private, I'm happy to be a sounding
board.
So do message me.
I'm happy to do
Nikolay: that.
I think, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I also see that selection of talks just based on abstract is
a very poor-quality event organization.
It should be done with, I think it should be done almost always
with pre-vetting talks, because it's mutually helpful.
Of course, it's time-consuming, but it's mutually helpful for
both sides.
So the speaker has a rehearsal, feedback, can improve, and the
program committee understands better and has aligned content.
Because usually bigger events do this.
Why are you skeptical?
I see your face.
Michael: I'm pulling your face for anybody listening Well my
experience with the the big Europe event We had hundreds
of submissions which but what which I know I was encouraging
people to submit multiple, but 5 or 6 is potentially too many.
If I'm just talking about 2 or 3, and you get hundreds of submissions,
and to vet, maybe you need a two-phase process.
1 is on abstract.
Nikolay: No, no, no.
It should be a four or five-phase process.
It should be five.
But of course, the process here requires development.
It requires experience and ideas and maybe this is for bigger
events.
For meetups, of course, a couple of talks, let's go, and you
just decide.
But if it's big, okay, 500 submissions, so what?
You see which won't go for sure, just remove them, it will be
already 200, and so on and so on.
Then you have shortlist, shortlist probably is 100, depending
on how many slots you have.
Then you need, of course, you need several.
For some people you need more than the accent speakers.
I don't know, Peter Zaitsev, you don't need to vet him at all.
It's really fine.
So automatic, fast track, we call it fast track.
That's it.
So automatically accepted, you just need to choose the topic
because always Peter Zaitsev is submitting 5 talks, always, maybe
more.
But for people you see first time or you have doubts, sometimes
people have doubts.
Also funny story, I was voting as program committee member, 1
guy, and then I ask questions, simple questions.
In the evening of the conference, the guy says, I won't do it.
These questions are killing me.
I understand I don't understand this topic well enough, but I
didn't agree with this guy.
I said he's good enough to present still.
I asked some important questions, but people can ask them as
well.
It's for preparation and so on.
It's not just to say failed and they said no, no, no, we still
want you.
So I needed to spend time in the evening before the event to
convince him to present.
I was like, please, you're still good.
So we had another call and I just said, you're good.
I needed to refill his energy and level of confidence because
I actually destroyed it.
It also requires experience from program committee members not
to attack.
I'm sitting like an expert, I'm going to like for self satisfactory,
you're saying so hard questions just but this is not right.
The goal is not to praise yourself, right?
You need to help to improve the quality of material and maybe
to give some idea what kind of questions people may ask.
Sometimes you say, our audiences, for example, usually are very
practical oriented.
You're from academia, let's try to connect better, right?
And you start asking questions and shift slightly focus here.
There are many nuances here, but the idea is sometimes if you're
too offensive, it can be harmful.
And this is, I think, the story, I was not super harmful, it
was just this speaker particularly was quite fragile.
By that time, in the early days when I was on the program committee,
for sure I was harmful sometimes, I know it.
But I fixed it myself.
So yeah, sometimes you need to put additional energy to fix it.
But if we don't have this process, we are blind.
Like we don't know, it's like maybe it will work, maybe not,
and people don't have time to prepare better.
They're alone.
People always appreciated this kind of process we had.
Always. They said, thank you, now I know.
Sometimes it was in person, by the way, like rehearsals in person,
if it's the same city, some people say, I'm going to ask this,
you don't need to rehearse the whole talk, you just say I'm going
to cover this, that, and this sequence.
And you have good feedback from people who are on the program committee,
usually, the program committee is organized from people who are CTOs
or something like that from big companies that have a lot of experience
so their feedback can be very helpful.
Not always but sometimes, right?
But you at least understand what to expect and improve and so
on.
So I think both conferences should follow this process.
They don't.
Many of them, they're just lazy.
Good enough, you know.
We don't record, we don't do rehearsals, we don't have money
for that or we don't have time for that.
Michael: Or it's different people, right?
Like I was on the talk selection committee, but I had no other
like I wasn't paid for it.
And it was like it was free.
Nikolay: I wasn't paid either for the program committee.
Never I was paid.
Oh, maybe we discussed it, but no.
Michael: That's the problem, right?
If you're already looking through hundreds of abstracts, the
idea of also looking at dozens of talks and giving constructive
feedback on early versions of those is just so much work for
unpaid people to do.
I think it's a lot to expect.
The problem isn't we shouldn't do that.
It's that we should work out a way to fund it and do it.
But on the flip side, I've been at very few bad talks.
Like what's the worst that happens if we give a chance to people
that haven't had it?
Nikolay: Super boring talk.
Michael: Yeah, that's the worst.
Nikolay: Audience knows material much better than the speaker.
It happens.
Yeah, but not often.
Michael: How often?
Nikolay: Quite often.
Okay.
And always when it happened, it was a mistake from the program
committee.
They didn't pay attention to it.
I had it.
I usually visited some talks for control level, for high load.
I just visited and then I provided feedback like, this is super
boring.
How come we selected it in the first place.
It's super boring.
And we improved over years and established a very good process.
And other events adopted a similar approach.
I know it for like 100% and all like some Java events adopted
and so on.
And they learned from us and we also developed it further, we
learned from them.
It was a mutual process and it lasted between 2007 to 2022.
Kind of like 15 years, right?
It was super fun and I think it's a good experience.
But again, I think, like, the bottom line from my side, it's
a lot of effort if you want a very good quality event.
And I think offline events must be with online components, at
least asynchronously with recordings.
And It's also, by the way, an additional ad for the conference,
because if you distribute materials with some delay and people
consume it even for free, they know this conference exists and
it delivers good materials.
Next time, probably they will convince their employer to pay
for a trip in person.
So this builds value over time and brand and so on.
Michael: I agree, I think free is great but even if you can't
afford to do it for free and it needs to be some small fee, I
think there's also a potential thing to be done there.
I think people are willing to pay for these things.
Nikolay: In my opinion, many more interesting things are happening
online these days, but okay, I might be returning to offline
events in a couple of years.
Michael: I think there's something to be said for local events.
I like going to any that are local to me in the UK or I'm planning
to go to one in Paris that I can get the train to quite easily.
Do you think that's quite nice to meet people in the area that
are also working on similar things?
The more international ones I think are interesting and the huge
ones I find quite daunting.
But I think there are some examples that we can learn from.
Like, I think the Rails world recent conference was organized
by professionals that were set up and funded by companies that
use Rails specifically to do things like improve the documentation
and hold a conference and do you think and they
Nikolay: super helpful
Michael: people that went to that conference I don't actually
know that it was made available online.
I don't think it was, but please correct me if I'm wrong there.
But people that went to that conference had such a great time
and were telling stories about it on podcasts I listened to
about, they were raving about how well organized it was, how
many fun things were put on.
It can be done even for open like, Rails is open source.
There's no reason you can't have paid people doing a professional
job in an open source world if it's a big enough community.
Maybe that's where we suffer a little bit.
Nikolay: Yeah, well, yeah, I agree.
So, yeah, anyway, a multi-modal approach is good.
Like, and a multi-channel approach is good.
So I agree there are big events.
I just maybe happened to have some special experience.
Michael: Yeah.
Thanks so much for sharing it.
Nikolay: Yeah, sure.
Sorry it took so long.
No, it's because...
Yeah, yeah.
Anyway, good luck to everyone who is attending.
If speakers, if it's not recorded, we can redo, definitely.
I just stopped inviting, but it doesn't mean, just because I
stopped inviting doesn't mean that we stopped fully.
And now we also have a pipeline to build blog posts easily from
that.
Michael: Great.
Nikolay: I know blog posting takes a lot of time, so this is
the way you spend 1 hour redoing your talk without preparation
and then you have a blog post out of it.
You fix some issues if any, and we post it anywhere.
Michael: Although I have noticed a slight trend towards some
slightly shorter blog posts.
I think some people are getting back into blogging a little bit
more and it's okay to write short blog posts.
In fact, this podcast is an entry into a blogging event that
is encouraging more people to write blog posts, no matter how
short or long they are or how much work they are, I would encourage
getting into chat.
Nikolay: Just be careful with ChatGPT for it, right?
Michael: Please don't, yeah.
Nikolay: Why not?
Okay.
Michael: Like, well, if you use Chat GPT, we'll do that, but
please, if you use Chat GPT, verify things that you're saying.
Nikolay: Not each word, but each token.
A token is a part of a word, you need to verify it very carefully.
Michael: And please verify it before you ask others to check
your blog post.
I've been burnt by that, and it's particularly painful verifying
it for someone else.
So yeah, that would be my advice to people using Chat GPT.
If you want people to keep reviewing your blog posts.
Nikolay: Makes sense.
Michael: All right, thanks so much, Nikolay.
Catch you next week. And thanks, everyone, for listening.
Nikolay: Bye.