Last week marked the 2025 edition of PGConf EU. I had many roles, and I'm excited to let you know that I have almost recovered from a very busy week. Below are my very personal highlights.
There was the PostgreSQL Women Breakfast at PGConf.EU 2025, organized by Priyanka Chatterjee and Teresa Lopes, and supported by the PostgreSQL Europe Diversity Committee. An initiative very much appreciated by all who joined.
(I'm there in the back, doing finger guns, for some reason...)
October 21, Karen Jex (Crunchy Data / Snowflake) and I talked about accessibility and the Hidden Disabilities Sunflower program at the Community Organizers Conf the day before PGConf EU. I tried to summarize what we discussed in this blog.
Karen and I, and Boriss Mejias and Jimmy Angelakos, also did a panel on mental health and neurodiversity in the open source community and at work that I tried to summarize here. We were all very moved by the people sharing their stories during and after the session, in-person and via private messaging. I'm very grateful to Karen and Jimmy for talking so openly about their neurodivergent brains, contributing to a healthy discourse in the Postgres community!
Speaking of healthy, I volunteered on the Code of Conduct team, like I've done so many times before at Postgres and other events. Led by Stacey Haysler, Celeste Horgan, Pavlo Golub and I had a mostly smooth time. Stacey and I talked a bit about general guidance for organizers when it comes to establishing a team to enforce the Code of Conduct at their event. More to come.
I enjoyed this year's keynote by Karen Sandler from the Software Freedom Conservancy, on the four freedoms of open source software - that are very important to her as a "patient deeply concerned with the technology in her own body". What happens when life-saving, proprietary software goes EOL?
My colleague Gabriele Bartolini and I talked about the challenges and lessons learned transferring stewardship of CloudNativePG to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). I've summarized the talk on my blog.
Our scheduled talk was not the only time Gabriele and I got to talk PostgreSQL on Kubernetes. One of the events I co-organized during the "Day 0" / Community Events Day, together with the wonderful Gülçin Yıldırım Jelinek, was just about that. The PostgreSQL Wiki has all the info, and links to presentations and notes. Gülçin and I were very happy with the turnout of around 65 people.
The other event I ran on October 21 was for community organizers. It was super fun learning from peers about how sponsorship and different event formats work in different regions.
My employer was also a Gold-level sponsor for the event, and many of my colleagues had scheduled sessions at the event. Below you see proof of me supporting my colleagues' stage performances. I laughed out loud more than once during Boriss' sessions, and I loved how my colleague Álvaro Herrera teamed up with Cybertec's Antonin Houska to talk about a patch they worked on.
Antonin's colleague Cornelia Biacsics talked about how everyone can contribute to the PostgreSQL project in their own way. Cornelia joined the postgres-contrib.org team, to help in the effort of making more visible the non-code contributions to the community. I joined the Contributors Committee last week, by shaking hands with Christoph Berg, Joe Conway, and Melanie Plageman at the event. We really should have taken that press photo...
Like last year Claire Giordano (Microsoft) made visible in a very entertaining way all the work that goes into a major PostgreSQL release, and the nurturing of a community. I can't wait for the blog/recording to come out for this one, it's an important talk that should be standard for every PGConf event, and possibly an exercise that can be shared. Although of course if Claire wants to travel the world I won't stop her!
One of Claire's contributions to the community is the absolutely stunning pictures she takes of the speakers. Way before the official event pictures are published, you see people adopting Claire's pictures as new profile pictures. I'm happy she was able to snap a picture of (part of) our PGDay Lowlands organizer team:
And of course I organized the (pg)karaoke event. We had 35 people in 2023 (Prague), 50 in 2024 (Athens), and I counted over 60 people over the course of the evening and night this year!
It would go against my moral code to post pictures from karaoke, so instead you get a picture of a dinner shared with EDB colleagues and friends. Until next time we meet!
Top comments (2)
Fantastic recap. It's nice to see all the different ways in which you are contributing to PostgreSQL. Great work Floor! Thanks for everything you do, and nice to see you joined the Contributors Committee.
Even though I missed, yet again, another PGConf, I appreciate the write up @floord !! And the "finger guns" helped identify you in that photo, so thanks to past you 😅😂