Alex Stetsenko

MongoDB conference is going to happen in Atlanta again this year. I’ve enjoyed MongoATL 2011 and already have made plans to attend this year too. Although the conference is still at “call for proposals” stage, I am sure there will be covered interesting topics since MongoDB popularity has grown significantly.

It is probably a good idea to follow event details on the MongoDB Atlanta 2012 official page. However location stays the same (GTRI Conference Center) and date is already known – April, 20th.

Last month I attended AT&T Mobile App Hackathon. Although our team did not make it to present an app it was absolutely fun experience.

First of all it was interesting to learn what’s going on in the world of mobile development. For instance turns out not many prefer native development especially for Android. Also the choice for non-native app development is not just limited to PhoneGap or Titanium. There are many more less known (for now) tools and APIs like appMobi or apigee.

Second, I had a chance to work on text to speech and voice recognition features for Android which I may incorporate into next generation of SAT Vocabulary.

Third, there was no free Wi-Fi. However on the bright side everyone had a chance to try out AT&T 4G Mobile Hotspot device. And it was absolutely awesome and fast which makes you want one. Kudos to AT&T actually since T-Mobile devices were showing no signal at the ATDC location.

The top three apps were:

• Four Corners – allows multiple players to scan a QR code to join a team in a game. Players tap on their own mobile device, which the impact is seen on the game board on a larger shared screen.
• YouJuke – social music selection.
• Food Porn – shows beautiful pictures of a food near you and gives you directions to it. It does nothing else and has absolutely no social networking whatsoever by design.

Looking forward to attending more events like that. Also AT&T is planning other hackathons in DC, SF, Boston and Orlando during October-December of 2011.

It has been written a lot about PHP Community Conference in Nashville, TN. The conference was definitely worth visiting. It was packed with outstanding PHP developers who were willing to share their knowledge and experience.

This post is mostly for my own records. Thus further reading:

• detailed PHP Community Conference Review by Calvin Froedge.
• slides and summary of major talks byJonathon Hill in Takeaways from PHPCon, day 1 and Takeaways from PHPCon, day 2.

And traditionally a few pictures from the field.

Looking forward to PHP Community Conference 2012!

Two month after Meetup with Tom Albers I was able to attend MongoATL Conference. The event was very well organized and really useful and igniting for MongoDB newbies (like myself at that time).

Of course the first thing I did after the conference was installing MongoDB and playing with its native PHP extension. Although I wanted to document that experience Vikram Vaswani had already come up with a great article on Getting Started with MongoDB and PHP.

In addition just a few things to highlight:

• MongoDB is really easy to start with and just works out of the box without any issues. So I was running my first query just a few seconds after it was downloaded.
• Despite the above mongodb.org offers browser shell to try MongoDB out online. So there is a way to play with it even before any download\installation is needed!
• If you are using Windows it is worth checking out a GUI tool MongoVUE which can be a great addition to the command line. Especially it comes really handy if one want to import some test data from MySQL or MS SQL.
• The Little MongoDB Book is a free ebook by Karl Seguin which should help get started with MongoDB as well as answer common questions.

At the end couple pictures from the event via my cell phone. 🙂

This is before Indexing and Query Optimization talk. It is still a break – that is why it looks empty.

This is bonus picture from GA Tech parking lot where the conference was held.

Back in December I attended a project management meetup with Tom Albers.

While Tom has an impressive list of companies where he was either senior manager or vice president, the most notable and attractive was the fact that he was manager of web development at MySpace.com. It seems like that kind of background allowed him to gather over 100 software developers and project managers.

It was interesting to learn something new from Tom’s experience as well as hear few insights about software development at MySpace. Although many his recommendations overlapped with Rework, I would like to point out two things which are basically must know and follow for anyone who related to managing software development:

• Present the problem, not the solution.
  Unfortunately there are so many cases when customers or managers do not trust their software engineers and ask them to implement certain solution without disclosing the problem or saying that it is the only possible solution. But it is not rare when after long discussions it turns out that the initial ‘solution’ is either not that great or even may not solve the problem at all.

• If you are not drawing, you are not communicating your team.
  Hopefully it is not true anymore but some time ago it was not rare when white boards were considered unnecessary. Also Tom pointed out that a tablet (iPad in his case) works as a perfect tool for communication with remote teams. It takes just seconds to draw something using touchscreen and then share (unlike traditional desktop applications since it take more time to draw using mouse and keyboard).

At the end just couple pictures taken with my cell phone.

Tom is explaining his vision on who senior developer is.

Coffee-break.

More (and better quality) pictures are posted here.

O’Reilly has announced they’re going to have a MySQL conference independently of Sun/MySQL AB. They promise to open the call for participation and registration in mid-December.

Other news is that Percona is not going to proceed with plans for their own Performance Conference. They are participating in the O’Reilly conference as a Gold Partner.

In spite of some changes there is still a good reason to visit Santa Clara 🙂 .

Update: Well… Sun has become a founding sponsor. Call for presentations as well as registration are open.

NoSQL East Conference 2009 summary has been published recently. So called tail includes links to feedback posts as well as some photos.

Also video and slides are available for only three talks:

• Cliff Moon – Dynomite,
• John Willis – Keynote,
• and Mike Miller – CouchDB

but more to come.

P.S.: seems like NoSQL (No SQL) might be converted to NOSQL (Not Only SQL). Will see how things are going to develop around NoSQL community.

Update: More video became available:

• Justin Sheehy – Riak,
• Arin Sarkissian – Cassandra,
• Kyle Banker – MongoDB,
• Tim Anglade – Tin,
• Kevin Weil – Pig,
• Chris Curtin – Cascading,
• Kevin Smith – Redis.

.

The 2010 edition of the MySQL Conference & Expo is already announced to take place in Santa Clara, CA on April 12-15.

Although schedule has not been published yet, obviously it is the most important event for MySQL professionals. The conference gathers over 2,000 open source and database enthusiasts from around the world.

At the same time Percona’s Director of Consulting has announced dates of Percona Performance Conference 2010. Of course it is April 12-13 🙂 . Neither place nor schedule have been unveiled yet. But last year it was the same building as MySQL Conference & Expo. In spite of it is not 100% MySQL related event, definitely some people will be pulled away from MySQL conference.

However Percona guys take their conferences very seriously. They have launched PerconaTV where video and slides of PPC 2009 are available.

By the way a lot of presentations and some videos are made available from MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 too.

These two events at one week could be a good reason to visit California. Looking forward to seeing additional details on both conferences.

Developing a new section at this blog I would like to post information about one more database related event.

OpenSQL Camp 2009 will be an un-conference style get together for people interested in Open Source Databases. They are not focusing on any specific project, and hope to see representatives from a variety of open source database projects attend. It is taking place in Portland, OR on November 13-15.

Currently announced sessions are:

1 Virtual Pivot Tables in SQLite – Brian Duggan
2 BLOB handling and storage using MySQL/Drizzle and the PBMS engine – Barry Leslie
3 Checking MySQL’s replication sync with Ma’atkit tools – Sheeri K. Cabral
4 The wiki database – Domas Mituzas
5 The architecture & roadmap for mod_ndb – J.D. Duncan
6 Implementation of the new SQL parser in mod_ndb – Tulay Muezzinoglu
7 Developing a Universal Storage Engine API – Bradley C. Kuszmaul
8 xtrabackup – tricks beyond backup , Vadim Tkachenko
9 Sphinx – tricks beyond fulltext , Vadim Tkachenko
10 Performance is about Response time , Vadim Tkachenko
11 Redis – The missing piece of the puzzle – Morgan Tocker
12 What MySQL is bad at – Morgan Tocker
13 memcached and the database – Patrick Galbraith and Matt Ingenthron
14 Comparing non-relational databases: CouchDB, Tokyo Tyrant, MongoDB
15 A completely versioned schema – Ben Hengst
16 An Introduction to MongoDB – Mike Dirolf
17 Maatkit’s Swiss Army Knife: mk-query-digest – Baron Schwartz
18 Solving problems by writing Drizzle Plugins – Monty Taylor

The good news that it is free (unlike NoSQL East Conference). But the bad news are that space is limited to 120 attendees and only 7 places are still available at the moment.

Once again I hope to see some video or audio materials from this event.

Update 10/26: 10 more spaces are available now, i.e. total will be 130 instead of 120.

The NoSQL movement has been gaining some steam lately, with discussion forums and blogs popping up all around the web. Now NoSQL East conference is planned in Atlanta, GA on October 28-30. The focus is promised to be on real world use cases and high level overview of architecture.

Currently they have announced the following speakers and topics:

Arin Sarkissian (Digg): Cassandra
Kevin Smith (Hypothetical Labs): Redis
Kevin Weil (Twitter): Pig
Chris Curtin (Silverpop): Cascading
John Hornbeck (Engine Yard): MongoDB
Mike Miller (Cloudant): CouchDB
Cliff Moon (Microsoft / Powerset): Dynomite
Justin Sheehy (Basho): Riak
Mark Gunnels (Catamorphic Labs): HBase
Tim Anglade (af83): tin
Emil Eifrem (Neo Technology): Neo4j
Geir Magnusson (Gilt Groupe): Project Voldemort
Yuan Yu (Microsoft Research): Dryad/DryadLINQ
John Corwin (Yahoo!): Sherpa

The conference will take place in Georgia Tech Research Institute – Conference Center. Although this event has some good sponsors it is not that cheap as it could be in the open source world. So it should be possible to sign up with a promo code Stammy250 and save $50.

Unfortunately I am not sure if I am able to attend this event. Hopefully there will be some video or slide casts available later. For example Bryan Fink shared his presentation on the riak web-shaped data storage engine which was a part of New York NoSQL mini-conference on October 5th, 2009.

P.S.: I am not affiliated with anyone of the conference organizers. However I believe it is always good to see what’s going on in the world of databases as well as to learn RDBMS disadvantages and ways how to avoid or fix them.