Why give talks at Postgres conferences w/Alvaro Herrera and Boriss Mejias | Path To Citus Con Ep03

Giving talks at Postgres conferences-or any open source developer conference-matters. Claire and Pino talk with Álvaro Hererra and Boriss Mejías, both longtime members of the Postgres community, to explore the value of giving conference talks-as well as the work involved, the time it takes, and the many different types of conference talks, including presentations about failure and things that have gone wrong. Should you add humor to your talks? How does your personality-introvert or extrovert-affect your conference presentations? Is it OK to give the same conference talk at different events?
In Episode 03 of the Path To Citus Con* podcast, Álvaro and Boriss are so much fun to talk to, as they share their experience giving talks at Postgres conferences.
* Path To Citus Con has been renamed to Talking Postgres. All of the past podcast episodes from Path To Citus Con-now called Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano-can be found here: talkingpostgres.com
Guests Álvaro Hererra and Boriss Mejías:
Álvaro Hererra has been a Postgres major contributor since 2002 and committer since 2005. He currently works at EDB (formerly 2ndQuadrant). Álvaro is a promoter of free & open source software in Chile in general, and was the organizer of PgDay Chile in 2019.
Boriss Mejías is a Senior Solution Architect at EDB. Boriss’s first encounter with Postgres was during his days in academia, where he earned a PhD in computer science. He volunteers and organizes Postgres conferences in Europe & coordinates the Postgres user group in Belgium.
Co-hosted by Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia:
Claire Giordano is head of the Citus Open Source and Postgres community initiatives at Microsoft. Claire has served in leadership roles in engineering, product management, and product marketing at Sun Microsystems, Amazon/A9, and Citus Data. At Sun, Claire managed the engineering team that created Solaris Zones, and led the effort to open source Solaris.
Pino de Candia is software dev manager at Microsoft since 2020 and is currently working on the Citus open source project. Pino previously worked on the managed PostgreSQL database service in Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL, which includes Citus on Azure support for distributed PostgreSQL. Pino has lived in New Orleans since 2017.
Chapters:
⏩ 00:00 Introducing Path To Citus Con Ep03!
⏩ 03:53 Wow, Boriss’s storytelling at Citus Con 2023
⏩ 11:20 Why giving talks at conferences matters
⏩ 23:15 Finding topics to speak about
⏩ 28:23 Sharing knowledge in open source communities
⏩ 33:20 Different types of Postgres talks
⏩ 36:59 Learn From My Failure (LFMF) talks
⏩ 41:40 Adding humor to your talks
⏩ 46:40 Introverts & extroverts
⏩ 51:09 Feedback in open source communities
⏩ 55:31 Virtual events vs in-person events
✅ Listen to more episodes:
Path To Citus Con podcast playlist: aka.ms/PathToCitusCon-playlist
🔔 Link to Boriss Mejías’s talk from Citus Con: An Event for Postgres 2023:
Postgres Storytelling: Support in the Darkest Hour: aka.ms/cituscon-borissm-2023
📕 Everything you need to know about Citus Con: An Event for Postgres 2023 can be found at: aka.ms/cituscon
📌 Let’s connect:  
Twitter - @CitusCon, / cituscon
📅 Subscribe to the monthly Path To Citus Con calendar:
aka.ms/PathToCitusCon-cal
#PathToCitusCon #TalkingPostgres #PostgreSQL