Tomorrow I fly to Ottawa, which a friend tells me is “the Ibiza of the north,” to attend PGCon 2023. This is my first PostgreSQL conference and I’m looking forward to absorbing as much information as I can and networking as much as I can.
My simple (simplistic?) understanding of the Postgres conference universe is that there are two series: PGConf and PGCon. The former are geared more to end-users and the latter, which I’m attending, is geared more to back-end developers and DBAs. As they’re run by different organizations, there must also be differences in conference logistics.
I attended PyCon US regularly when I worked in Python, which was from 2005 to 2022. PyCon’s community, information density, and logistics were first-rate, and I looked forward to it every year. Alas, I haven’t touched Python since working at Brex. I’ve been mostly coding in TypeScript, which has been, eh, interesting. So attending PyCon isn’t something I could justify to my employer and I didn’t feel like shelling out my personal bucks to attend.
The texture of the conference registration process and communications to date reminds me of PyCon, but a little less polished. I don’t know the registration headcount, but the conference length and breadth (number of talks) is certainly less than PyCon.
The earliest PyCons I attended were smaller and more enjoyable than the later ones. As Python’s popularity skyrocketed, so did the conference size, which had positive and negative ramifications. I’m looking forward to attending a smaller, maybe more home grown conference and mixing with a different technical crowd.
More later!
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