During June-July I had pretty much completed adding the features that I myself had in mind impress.js (as you might have read on this blog back then). Some of those features of course had been asked for multiple times by others as well, in particular the ability to define slide positions relative to the previous slide, was a popular request, with several pull requests proposing it as well. Now that I've added such a plugin, I have to say it is indeed much more convenient way of authoring presentations.

Vacation is almost over - and it's still 17 degrees outside :-( It's time to start packing for Portland.

I'm as excited as ever, since this year I'm delivering 2 talks. Both fall into the category which is a long time passion of mine - open source community and business. It's refreshing to not have to talk about databases for once :-)

CLS

The Community Leadership Summit is mostly an unconference, but in recent years have started adding short 15 minute pre-arranged talks. (Kind of like morning keynotes, even if they don't call them that.) On Sunday the 19th, I will be do a talk called Open Source Governance Models Revisited.

5 years of MySQL

People often write a blog post when they reach some nice anniversary since they joined MySQL community. Well, for those old enough it usually means when they joined MySQL AB as employee. For me this was January 2008. Because I didn't remember the month correctly, I haven't blogged anything then, but decided to save it for a better opportunity - now.

TL;DR Starting this week I will be working for 10gen, selling MongoDB to the Nordics. This blog post is really long - even then it doesn't contain the most interesting stories, I'm not sure if they can ever be published. Sorry for the length, but remember you don't need to read all at once. This is my last MySQL post so save some of it for cold winter days!

2008 - Sun acquisition

One of the greatest things with working in the MySQL community has been to meet so many people and travel in different countries and cultures. In my last blog post I mentioned how I learned that in Southern Europe it is considered offensive to go too early to meet your customer. As the customer is expecting you to come later than agreed (everyone always does), if you show up too early you are taking away time that he was expecting to still use to prepare for the meeting.

MySQL Community Awards 2013 were announced earlier today at the MySQL Conference & Expo...

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It's time again to award persons, applications and companies in the MySQL Community. This is an annual tradition to highlight and give appreciation to some of the things that make MySQL so great.

The first awards were given out in 2005, and since 2010 the winners have been chosen by a community panel of which myself and Shlomi Noach are the co-secretaries. There has been a public nomination period in January and the final voting is done by a panel who are themselves former winners of the award.

The first category is

MySQL Community Awards: Community Contributor of the Year 2013

The first winner is...

Jeremy Cole

For reasons that I will blog about in a couple of weeks, several people last week asked me what I think about open core. My answer was that nowadays I don't care much about the topic. Long time readers of this blog might be surprised at such an answer, so I thought this was a good time to reflect on why I don't think it is very important anymore, and more importantly to document the empirical evindence that we now have about open core as a business strategy.

This page has moved to: https://mysqlawards.org/mysql-hall-of-fame/

This page is a permanent home for listing all winners of MySQL Community, Partner and Application awards. It includes both the 2005-2009 awards chosen by MySQL AB marketing, as well as the 2010- awards chosen by a community panel.

Trivia: Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP and inventor of the SQL LIMIT clause is a winner of this award.
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It is a new year and it's time again to start thinking of all the great people and companies that make the MySQL ecosystem so great. It is time to start thinking of this year's MySQL Community Awards.

Last year we had a record number of winners, eleven goblets were handed out! But behind the scenes things were even more exciting, there were several ties that forced the panel to do extra tie-breaking voting rounds. In one category we even had a 6-way tie! All of this just testifies to how much is happening in the MySQL world nowadays.

There are a few interesting learning resources recently created by activists in the MySQL community. I just wanted to link to them to spread the word. They are free and if you've been looking for a way to learn more about MySQL, you should have a look at these.

MySQL Marinate

This is something I haven't really seen done before (for MySQL): a virtual self study group. It is based on the idea of everyone reading the same book, and I assume Sheeri will then facilitate some commentary on what your read. Sheeri mentioned this in a blog post earlier, but yesterday I went to check the signup page and wow - there are already 117 (or 76, depending on whether you look to the left or to the right) students registered!