Leaving Heidelberg

As I sit in the lobby, taking a break, waiting to leave to the airport for my next destination, I just think about what a great week I’ve had. Its been packed, with just far too much to do. Mornings starting at 4.30am and nights ending at 3am just seem so normal. I’ve taken a ridiculous number of photos, which I hope will make their way online slowly, but expect to see them even in the following month.

Heidelberg DevMeeting
At the team exhibitions…

One of the great things about the Heidelberg DevMeeting was being able to interact with my team a lot. Being in a distributed environment, I must say this is the most face-to-face time we’ve had just to hang out, talk, eat, get stuff done, drink, walk around, socialise, etc. Its highly amazing. Really. Don’t even think about doing so at the Users Conference in Santa Clara – everyone’s too busy, and the mandate is to interact with as many non-MySQLers as possible.

So today, as I said goodbye to everyone in my team (and the few stragglers all around the Old City of Heidelberg), I actually felt sad. Knowing that the next time we will all see each other will be months away.

Heidelberg DevMeeting
Stand up, reduce meeting times!

At least I’m all pumped up to go back and Get Stuff Done (I wonder if that’s trademarked?)

Zack says it best:

But man cannot live by email, Skype, and IRC alone. So every now and then we get groups together for meetings.

This was really our first team gathering, in (and for) a long time. And interacting with the other teams. Just amazing. Kudos to the organisers. The program was just amazing. And yes, human and team interaction is really important.

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2 Comments

  1. wahlau says:

    too bad we could not meet up. Next time, surely we will have a chance. Perhaps in Beijing? :)

  2. […] Developers conference in Heidelburg, Germany. A number of the developers blogged about it including Colin Charles, Paul McCullagh and Lukas Smith. They discuss upcoming features including my favorite – the coming […]


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