Jan/Feb 2016 MariaDB Server related worklog

Yearly reviews happen but when you’re moving in a fast paced world like the Internet (they say every 3 months on the Internet is like a real world year, right?) its nice to keep track of what happens from time-to-time.

Back in the good ‘ole days of Monty Program Ab, we kept up this idea of “weekly reports”, which included time spent, because according to the Hacking Business Model that meant you would add it all up, multiply it by a VIP number, and find out how many shares you would gain. This had the nice tradeoff that you would count how much you’ve worked, and watch how much time you’d “overwork” (or underwork) in a 2-week period, and anything in excess of 75 hours was noted in a field called “balance hours”. You could then take this time off at your will, just like vacation time (which was extremely generous at MPAb). Bottom-line: you were rewarded for every bit of time you put into the company!

Long story short, since quite a lot of the work I do is public-facing, I might as well try keeping logs of what happens in a public fashion, no?

Short January, I spent half of it on vacation (year end thing) and the other half working. February was a little longer but I also spent a week on vacation. Got to love all the public holidays that are peppered in-between.

  • Spoke at SCALE14x, did some booth duty, got to catch up with a few colleagues and people within the community. Big mistake for me is coming back from a long vacation only to go to an event within the same week — makes it hard to prep material as well as deal with deluge that is one’s INBOX.
  • Attended MonkiGras, which focused on making stuff, and I was truly inspired. Again great networking.
  • Attended FOSDEM, splitting time between the distributions and MySQL & friends tracks, as well as the main conference. This is a huge event, and meetings happen everywhere (I even did some breakfast meetings). Another highlight was of course the MySQL Community Dinner which was great to be at, good food made with love, wonderful beer and not to forget that MariaDB Corporation was also a sponsor.
  • Attended ConfMgmtCamp which is proving to be a truly great add-on to FOSDEM. Ghent is nearby, the content is amazing, and this is stuff we have to always focus on.
  • Meeting with Kaj (MariaDB Corporation) in Munich. 1:1 was short, as we also had Product Manager Ralf Gebhardt join in.
  • Visited Sofia, Bulgaria for the first time — Bulgarian Web Summit is a huge event with over 800+ attendees and they really enjoyed learning about MariaDB Server (spent about as long as the talk after it, answering questions).
  • Applied to and approved for Google Summer of Code 2016, so we are a mentoring organisation again.
  • Contributed to an upcoming whitepaper for MariaDB Corporation.
  • Answered 17 questions from prospects and customers that sales (engineering) bumped up to us; 1 support question; many from marketing
  • Sent various people slides for them to repurpose things for webminars, or just look at it for reference material
  • Talk about Planet MariaDB with marketing; no we don’t run it. But yes, it would be nice if there were more filters applied to it.
  • MariaDB Server won Database of the Year for the LinuxQuestions forums.
  • Many people are interested in InfiniDB from Japan to Bulgaria.
  • Talk about the Paris & London roadshows; agree to participation.
  • Got my account on the The MariaDB Knowledgebase fixed; there’s SSO now so I guess the only thing that has a different account now is Jira.
  • I don’t report as many bugs as I would like, but here’s a few: MDEV-9458: FR: Super read-only mode, MDEV-9582: FR: Ansible galaxy roles, and MDEV-9658: FR: Add RocksDB as a storage engine to MariaDB Server.
  • I made a few posts to the lists, but the one I’m most happy about was Aliasing slave_parallel_workers/slave_parallel_threads. Why? Because within a week, there was discussion, this was done and pushed to 10.2. I’m also hoping we start seeing Time delayed replication appear soon. Transportable tablespaces is something still to investigate when it comes to documentation.
  • Blogged:
    1. SCALE14x – lots of MySQL content there
    2. FOSDEM 2016 – See you in Brussels
    3. Donating to an opensource project when you download it
    4. SCALE14x trip report
    5. Amazon RDS updates February 2016

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