One man's voice Thoughts, rants and commentary of a simple man

Meeting up with some local MySQL users

This past Monday I had the fortune of attending my very first meetup. I had set a goal for myself a few weeks ago that I would attend one before the end of the year. It happened way sooner that I thought it would and resulted in me being able to mix it up with a few fine folks at the Silicon Valley MySQL Meetup.

There was a business need for me hitting this thing up. Firstly, I am a web developer. I am not a DBA and I am certainly not a MySQL guru. I can write queries but the extent of my MySQL knowledge ends right about there. Secondly, I am responsible for management and maintenance of all of our MySQL servers at work. There is one chief DBA who is a Sybase queen, another two or three folks that know their way around a Sybase server (and to a lesser extent a general database server) and then there is me and my colleague who write web apps and MySQL queries. Thirdly, I am an administrator for a very popular PHP developers forum and knowing how to get myself out of the stupid ass scraped I have gotten us into when it comes to MySQL would be darn handy.

So I set out to hit this meetup. It was held at the Sun Microsystems complex in Palo Alto (or Redwood City or wherever you are when you come off the Dumbarton Bridge on the Peninsula side). I was looking forward to finally meeting a man that I have been communicating with for some time now (yes, you Don) and to networking with other MySQL/PHP/Web developers in my local geographic region. And I was not disappointed.

The talk itself was a little boring to be honest. But that is because I am not at all interested in database shards and the whatnot. However I was very interested in meeting Don Ravey, a fellow moderator on our forums, Mr. Tish Wood, a very prominent member of the PHP Meetup community and one of the coordinators of the meetup Eric Bergen from Proven Scaling. Not only that, but there were a host of other people there that provided excellent commentary, questions and challenges for the speaker of the evening.

I love being in the mixed company of brilliant people like that. It is humbling, exciting and gives me something to look forward to. I so enjoyed being there, connecting, talking with people, meeting a few folks and hopefully being able to glean something from someone somewhere. I just hope that I can, at some point, make it to another meetup. Perhaps a LAMP meetup or a PHP meetup. After this last meetup Tish asked me if I would at all be interested in speaking to a group at the Greater SF Bay Area LAMP meetup. I think I would love to do that.

If I can find an evening to get away for a while longer than this last evening. And if we can find a way to not have a meetup in San Francisco. Because as much as I like socializing and hanging with other technology professionals, I cannot fathom the thought of heading to The City for a 7:00 PM meeting on a weekday evening. Until then though, I can start thinking about what I would talk about if I were to ever talk.

And hopefully I will be a little more relevant to a n00B than that fella at the MySQL meetup was to me. He was good and he knew his stuff for the most part. But it was not my cup of tea so I sort of lost interest a little in the subject matter. That was ok though, because I met people, got numbers and had a free coke. In the end, what could be better than that?