Well this is going to be a short blog post that will not really manage to summarize all the experience on my San Francisco, Santa Clara, San Francisco, Austin, Tampa, Boston, Chicago, Zürich, Berlin, Güstrow, Berlin, Zürich round trip I was on for the last 4 weeks. But anyways, I wanted to mention that the slides from php|tek are now linked in the slides section.
I did a talk on various strategies of how to bridge relational databases and object-oriented programming. In retrospect I should have submitted this as a "double feature" talk, so that I could cover more ground on the actual using of the existing packages in the PHP space.
The other talk was on database locking. I think the biggest eye opener for people in that talk was about how MVCC, found in Firebird, Oracle, InnoDB and PostreSQL, really works and how to control the behavior as needed.
Anyways, here is the short summary of all the places I have visited:
- San Francisco is beautiful, very nice parks, but remember to bring some warm clothing, especially in the summer
- San Clara gives you the nice warm weather you would expect from California
- Austin has a really nice live music bar scene
- Tampa, uhm well actually I stayed in Palmetto at my parents. My parents are simply nuts for working so hard on keeping their 5 acre (2 hectare) property so nice. Also cool to see that there are 40+ pickup practices for ultimate frisbee players like me in the area.
- Boston was the city that impressed me the most. Somehow I just really liked walking around there
- Chicago has a very nice downtown bar area around Wrigley Fields. People are very open and friendly. The downtown area apparently does not even try to compete with the bars down there and closes down early, but it does feature a very nice mix of skyscrapers from different decades
- Berlin is as beautiful as always
- East German cities have also become so much nicer of the last few years. I spend a day at a Wedding on the weekend in a place that was simply amazingly gorgeous.
- Its always nice to meet people in person that you only knew via email. So it was very nice to meet up with so many people at MySQL User conference, php|tek and of course the 3 offices from Optaros I was able to visit on my trip. Same of course applies to seeing my parents and my sister again.
Thats all folks :)
PS: Forgot to mention. If you want me to have more time to spend on OSS stuff, then please send in your CV to expand our PHP team at Optaros, so that my work load can go down a bit (I can always dream, right?). Do not get too worked up about the positions listed on the careers page, trust me .. we need you and you and you :)
Not forgetting CouchDb, which also gives you MVCC and a lot more :-)
@Steve: err .. of course you are right .. its Palmetto .. then again if you really want to be exact they are living in Ellenton .. but thats even smaller ;)
