The Conference Circuit

[csn]

There sure seem to be a lot of tech people who go to a lot of conferences, while they also "work" at tech companies. Take for example Yahoo and Jeremy Zawodny, Andrei Zmievski, and Rasmus Lerdorf - the former goes around pimping Mysql and his "high performance mysql" book, the latter two pimp PHP. Do you suppose Yahoo pays for them to do all this? Or does the conference hook them up with travel, room, board, etc.? Or maybe mysql hooks them up? At any rate, they're definitely taking time off from work. I don't see how pimping PHP, Mysql, etc. is in Yahoo's interest.

Zawodny going to media conference to speak about high performance mysql (http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/005592.html)

Andrei - PHP & Unicode in Vancouver (http://www.gravitonic.com/blog/archives/000125.html)

I saw Rasmus at ApacheCon a year ago (promoting PHP).

How does this racket work? ;)

[Sxooter]

I saw Rasmus many years ago (think PHP V 3) and he was an excellent speaker. Most conferences will pay the speakers to speak, so if they can get someone to cover travel and hotel, they can at least break even, even make a bit of scratch. I met some of the PostgreSQL crew at an OSCON event a couple of years ago, and I know that their companies had paid for them to go respectively. I think part of it has to do with keeping your people happy. If Jeremy gets to go to OSCON, Jeremy is happy, if Jeremy is happy, he'll stay at Yahoo.

It was funny, we (Tom Lane and Bruce Momjian the postgresql guys) went to dinner with a whole table full of MySQL guys. It's funny that when it's dinner and just hanging out, the animosity just sorta dissapears and we all have dinner and chat. MySQL AB did pick up the whole tab though, so that was pretty cool of them. I was VERY impressed with Tom Lane. One of the smartest people I've ever met. Bruce is also quite smart, but Tom is freaky smart. About 2/3 of the MySQL folks were tech support types or CEO types, but a couple of their actual factual developers were there, and so was Jeremy, if memory serves.

I'm guessing that most companies do it to keep their people happy, and to also attract users and or other coders for their projects and such. I'd highly recommend any to go to a few cons and get to meet some of the "heroes of open source" that show up.

I still remember what Rasmus said: "I really like Java, it's a great language. I just wish it worked."

[csn]

Definitely doesn't seem like a bad gig - a lot of these guys have travelled the world extensively - Asia, Europe, Australia, South America, all over the US.

Yeah, I think Tom Lane is hugely responsible for the continuing greatness of PostgreSQL. I regularly read his posts on the pg lists and time and again he shoots down bad ideas, points out problems, keeps things on the right course, and otherwise reveals an impressive breadth and depth of knowledge. Do you know where else he gained his experience (other projects, companies, degrees, etc.)? I Googled him, but didn't find anything (there appears to be an actor named Tom Lane (and artist, and golfer), which dominate the results).

Edit - Ah, found something. PhD in compsci, wow.
Tom Lane
Tom Lane has over ten years open source development experience. He is widely known as organizer and lead programmer of the Independent JPEG Group. Involved with PostgreSQL since 1988, Lane is now a member of PostgreSQL's core steering committee. Most of his Postgres work is on the query planner/optimizer, though he does fix bugs in many other parts of the system. Lane holds a PhD in computer science as well as a bachelor's in electrical engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University. He has twenty-five years' professional experience in a wide range of systems software development tasks.
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/user/view/e_spkr/1218

[Elizabeth]

I think it's good exposure for Yahoo; certainly free publicity for them and good experience for the speakers... and I think it legitimizes Yahoo's place in the PHP racket ("hey we're so good, people pay money to hear our employees speak!") So no, I don't think they would have a problem with it.

[Sxooter]

The only other thing I know about Tom is that he was one of (if not THE) primary developers behind the jpeg format.