Wednesday
MySQL AB’s developer meeting lasts an entire week. The community days, as they call it, are only on Thursday and Friday, but Lenz asked me to come on Wednesday night for the get-together then. I arrived five minutes after they all left without a trace.
Thursday
The developer meeting is organzied like proper conference. There are different sessions to go to in different rooms, coffee breaks and everything. The morning sessions are actual team meetings while in the afternoon there are MySQL University lessons.
MySQL University is a weekly installment where a smart person lectures about a hot topic in the MySQL world (NDB Architecture, Using BitKeeper, Running MySQL with a debugger just to name a few). They started out as MySQL internal training courses, but have long evolved into public events that anybody can take part in via IRC and live audio streaming. For free – how cool is that? The sessions here get taped and archived for those who could not attend in person.
For dinner we went on a boat cruise on the Neckar. We saw a stunning scenery, sunset, moonrise and clear sky all one after the other. The boat catered a terrific buffet, live music and a very attentive crew. Everybody felt being treated fairly well.
When I left, it felt like the end of two busy days, not just one. Information floats around at very high bandwidth. There are tons of new stuff, even more updates on existing topics and it has been a year since everybody met, so there is a lot of catching up to do, too. MySQL AB grew tremendously in the last years. From Monty and David founding the company a they are up to 400 employees currently. These people, while not all in development, have quite some projects to work on and here, everyone is eager to talk about it. This is both, interesting and tiring in the same way. Stay tuned for part two.
