At the airport, trying to sum up my impressions from Percona Live 2013 conference in Santa Clara.
Woo! Hard to sum up four excellent days. Shall I review the great talks I’ve been to? The keynotes? The well organized events?
You know what, skip it. There was ONE thing that overshadowed everything. It was the ONE thing for me that was the pure essence of the conference and its greatest joy:
Meeting and talking to a great many great people!
I was fortunate to meet up with so many people; none that I planned; things just went in such way that I engaged in so many conversations with so many people. I found myself talking about hamsters, peacocks, living in the village, living in the city, working from home, commute, relocation, working with your spouse, life in Israel, life in Argentina, prisons in the US, having many children, gun control, politics (heaven forbid!), fruit, vegetables, breakfasts, open source, community, buying (non-expensive) presents to your kids, new ventures, zen, philosophy, capitalism, socialism, books, being who you are, weddings, Java, scripting, NoSQL, how to contribute to an open source project, … the list goes on.
I was “adopted” by the PalominoDB team at Pedro’s, crash-partied on Pythian fellows, talked technical (or non technical) with Tokutek guys, meeting up with Oracle people (finally I get the faces behind the names!); the companies do not matter, I’m just throwing in names. The people are awesome! Representing their companies on the technical side, and being purely interesting people on the personal side, I met with men and women from all over the community. Apologies: impossible to list all nor account for!
It’s great to have a place and time where we all meet together.
The bottom line? I am fortunate to have my current profession: I enjoy my work, and the people I meet are fantastic and of the highest quality!
Thanks all with whom I’ve met, and for all of those with whom I haven’t had the chance to speak: see you next time!