My trip to Zagreb: DORS/CLUC 2024

It was in the afternoon of Tuesday that my trip commenced from Amsterdam Airport to Franjo Tuđman International Airport in Zagreb. I was contemplating how long it had been since I was in Croatia in general and Zagreb specifically. One thing was clear, it was going to be an evening with a good dinner and some good wine, together with my friend Marin Bjeliš from Nimium. After having tried to join the DORS/CLUC for the last couple of years, I am super excited that it finally happened in collaboration with Nimium and CYBERTEC!

On May 15, the event officially started with "Open4Business". Traditionally, this event is a semi-formal gathering of organizations active in the broader Open Source community in and around Croatia. As part of the networking aspect of the event, I had the opportunity to introduce CYBERTEC and discuss “Data Management in the 21st Century”.

The next two days marked the official conference, followed by a hackathon happening over the weekend. 

The event took place at the wonderful Algebra University in Zagreb. 

Open Data, Kubernetes, OSM - selecting which presentations to attend

There were 40 presentations, including my "Just don't do it - Databases in Kubernetes". You can find my presentation here.

Hans-Jürgen Schönig, our CEO was also there presenting the topic "PostgreSQL performance in 5 minutes". Most of the other presentations sounded very interesting, so choosing which ones to attend was quite challenging. Ultimately, I decided to go for the following presentations:

Where have the women of tech history gone?
Open Source Networking – future-proofing traditional network stack
Log me tender
The Future of OpenData: Emerging Trends and Cybersecurity Implications
Unikraft: A POSIX-compliant Unikernel for the Cloud
DevOps for Enterprise infrastructure made easy.
Open Source Metaverse
Did Open Source win a Pyrrhic victory?
Biomedical animal research – from closed doors to open source
Clouded Databases
D – the best language you probably have not heard about

My takeaways from the conference

One of the main reasons to attend these events is to gain valuable insights for personal growth and for CYBERTEC´s benefit. I learned a lot in many areas, and discovered that many roads lead to PostgreSQL! As always I got to meet many new people and reconnect with old acquaintances.

Understanding and knowing that the past helps you put things in a new perspective for the future, it was fun to learn that “a thread” in computer science comes from a physical thread of yarn in the original Jacquard’s loom. This loom inspired Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer that Ada Lovelace worked on. This in turn links back to the opening keynote of the conference, much like the term “bug”, which an actual was bug (moth) in one of the earlier computers, shorting out a relay.

Thank you for the organization - DORS/CLUC!

It was great to see so many new faces and acquaintances from the Postgres scene on site. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the organizers of the DORS/CLUC 2024 under the inspiring leadership of Svebor Prstačić. It was a pleasure to be a part of this event. CYBERTEC will return bigger and bolder in 2025 to be part of the 30th episode of the DORS/CLUC conference!