Shawn Sorichetti

There are 277 sessions at SCALE 23x this year. I know this because I extracted all of them from the schedule webarchive files and scored every single one. I’m not proud of how long this took. But it surfaced some genuinely interesting tradeoffs — and the pattern of what conflicted with what tells you something real about where platform engineering is right now. The scheduling problem is different when you manage a team # When I was an IC, conference scheduling was mostly about depth. Find the three talks that will blow your mind and plan the rest around them. Everything else is hallway track.

At one of the Toronto Perl Mongers meetings Olaf was demonstrating something or other and during the demonstration he used Alfred to search metacpan. I’ve been a LaunchBar user for a long time, but the Alfred plugin offered auto completion, something my LaunchBar search didn’t have. He proceeded to show a couple of the other plugins (which I don’t recall at this point) and I decided I needed to try it out too.

This week has been The Perl Conference in Pittsburgh or TPCiP (a tough acronym for the forearms to write). For some reason flights from Toronto to Pittsburgh all require a layover somewhere, and the shortest flight is 7 hours. Of course this does not include the time it takes to get to and from the airport, nor customs and security clearance. The drive is only 6 hours. The Sessions # I always intend to take notes as the presentation are happening. This rarely happens as I get more drawn into the presentation. It’s either pay attention or take notes, and I’d rather pay attention.

After rebuilding this site and my work site, I wanted a view into whether people were visiting the sites, and if they are, which pages they were interested in. I have simple needs: How many people are visiting When are they visiting What are they visiting If they’re referred from another site, which I don’t want to know anything else, nor do I want to give any of my visitor details to Google. When I started looking into alternatives I came across It’s not me, Google, it’s you - from GA to Fathom by Jeff Geerling. Those who work with Ansible, may recognize him for his Ansible roles or his book (Ansible for DevOps). Both are highly recommended.

I’m heading to PgCon 2019, this will be my first time attending a PostgreSQL specific conference. A lot of the work that I do involves PostgreSQL in some way, be it as a developer, architecting database solutions, or digging into application performance issues. I’ve been to a number of Toronto PostgreSQL User Group meetings and through discussions with others at the meeting, this is the conference to go to for technical information. I have opted to attend the Unconference which takes place the day before the talks start. It sounds like an interesting concept where the content of the day is determined by the attendees.