MySQL Users Conference 2008

Yeah !!! We win a trip to California after working too hard on a replication plugin for MySQL.

It was a 30 hours journey to arrive in California. The goal was to attend the MySQL Users Conference and show ideas developed in the context of the GORDA Project.

Mission accomplished my friends.

Me and my Friend Luis met a lot of interesting people and had passioned discussions on replication. Unfortunately, there was no much time to attend talks even the one given by Werner Vogels. There were more than 2000 people thinking on MySQL, learning a little bit more on it, doing business, doing contacts and hiring people. I was not expecting such atmosphere: everyone was breathing MySQL. Even the competition was attend the conference. There were many guys from Microsoft, IBM and Oracle.

In our spare time, we went to San Francisco to see the Golden Gate and Alcatraz. While driving through the street of Santa Clara, Palo Alto, etc, etc we came across buildings from important enterprises such as Google, IBM, Yahoo, Oracle, Microsoft and from important universities such as Berkley and Standford.

Nice trip, but I am afraid that I got excited for driving a Mustang as I did not pay attention to the traffic lights. Most likely my next credit card bill will give me a stroke.

Cheers.

Anouncements: JOIN 2008 cancelled and talk at UAB

It is really a pity and unfortunate that the JOIN 2008 event was canceled. I was preparing a talk with the idea of having content and fun, something different than traditional so it would not be boring and, most of all, put students to think about and, if possible, discuss the topic.

I was having lots of fun preparing it. The idea was it to be presented like a fairy tail (suited to the title). The index was called "Once upon a time..." and the first theme was "Chapter One: When the princess became a frog" where I would talk about my first experience with software engineering in a huge software development where all the aspects of engineering were imposed by the contract and our consulting company had no engineering culture in the software field. Well, the result is that instead of being helped by the process I felt we would be far more productive without it (or with a different use of it). The software engineering princess (I know in the tale it is a prince but I rather prefer a princess myself) became a heavy frog :)

Anyway. The event as well as the talk are canceled. I wish the organization board more luck next time.

In the meantime I was invited for a talk at Universidad Autonoma of Barcelona about Post-Doc. The idea is to talk about my experience and how I see a post-doc. Title is:

Postdoc: useful, necessary ... or a waste of time?

It will take place in the Computer Architecture and Operating Systems department at UAB, May 9th at 12:30. More information here.

Anouncement: Talk at JOIN 2008

Hi there, I will be giving a talk at JOIN ("Jornadas de Informática") in Braga, Portugal on May 1st. If you are around and want to "JOIN", be my guest (don't forget to talk with the organization team before :-) ).

The talk will be on Software Engineering.

This will be a great challenge for me once I am not an expert in software engineering although I have been deploying software for at least 10 years now.

I decided to take the risk and talk about my personal experience. I think students have their professors to talk about theories but experience is different, especially in software engineering that is so "not" used everywhere.

The title of the talk is:

Werewolves, little red riding hood, software engineering and other fairy tales: my personal experience in 10 years at the “software development” field.

There it goes a short abstract.

Over the last 10 years I worked on the developing of database applications in an IT Consulting Company in Brazil; managing the development of an ERP system; warehouses and ETL systems in the IT department of a Communication Group in Brazil; deploying scientific applications for my PhD and post-doc in the different cultural environments of Spain and Germany. Nowadays I work at HP Labs doing research on the development of a full-system execution-driven simulator for massive clusters of massive cores. Where and how did software engineering interact with my personal work? How close is software engineering to the traditional engineering? Or is it a long and elaborate fairy tale? What is my personal opinion about it? What am I using now and where I would like to get? This talk is about a one-man experience and his believes of software engineering, computer systems and a bit more.

I hope it will be interesting and fun.