This past weekend, Selena, Mark & I loaded up Mark's car with flyers, mugs & t-shirts & headed up to Bellingham, WA for Linuxfest NW (website: http://linuxfestnorthwest.org/).

Several LUGs in the area host this annual conference. This was my first Linuxfest & I was really impressed - it was very well-organized, well-attended and FUN.

Mark gave his talk about ptop/pgtop first thing Saturday morning. We managed to see some other talks too - Selena checked out some Drupal talks & I went to Eric Hopper's IPv6 discussion on Sunday.

We all had a great time running the booth, despite the lack of JD's entertaining presence. He was replaced by surprise guest boothster, Chris Travers! Chris showed up to give a LedgerSMB talk and we conned him into boothbeasting with us. Thanks, Chris! Even though it was crowded behind our table, I think four staffers was the right (minimum!) number to have for handling questions & greeting people.

The conference was really packed. I think I talked at length to somewhere around 12-15 people. We had a HUGE range of questions, all the way from people wondering about replication strategies to "What's a database, anyway?" We also ran through the inevitable "how do you pronounce it?" Selena gave a long demo of pgadmin to someone who is currently using SQL Server. A lot of people are very interested in a MySQL -> PostgreSQL migration tool.

We ran out of almost all printed materials we'd brought on the first day, necessitating phone calls to Josh B to acquire more flyers and a local copy shop to print them. Selena had the brilliant idea to get some elephant logo stickers printed as well; they were very popular.

Saturday night, Silicon Mechanics hosted the afterparty at the American Museum of Radio & Electricity, a truly excellent site for a geek party! We got to dink around with static electricity machines & toys from past centuries. Selena stepped up to the theramin while Mark & I checked out the old music boxes. The best part of the evening for me was when the docents set up a small tesla coil. >:) We had a great little indoor lightning show & Selena became part of a multi-person chain that lit up a fluorescent tube.

Back home now, attempting to recover from Conference Brain.

Meeting in one week!

Date: Thursday, April 17, 2008
Time: 7:00pm (that's 1900 hours.)
Place: FreeGeek

Our own David Wheeler will give a repeat performance of his talk from PostgreSQL Conference West 2007:

Ruby on Rails Essentials for PostgreSQL Enthusiasts

Has all the hype got you jazzed to develop Ruby on Rails applications on PostgreSQL? Is virtually everything you find about Rails MySQL- specific? Come to this talk to learn all you need to know to make Rails and PostgreSQL work together harmoniously. Topics will likely include:

* The ins and outs of Rails migrations
* How to add support for foreign key constraints
* Managing partial indexes and other PostgreSQL-specific objects
* Working with views
* Monkey patching for fun and profit
* Supporting multi-column primary keys
* The joys and pains of Rails collections
* Working with time zones
* The antiquity of the Ruby PostgreSQL driver (NOT)
* Enforcing constraints in Rails *and* in the database
* Getting Rails to execute *your* queries instead of its own
* Saved queries for "fat models"

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See you there!