Community feelings at P2D2 2024 

Last week, I had the privilege to accompany my colleagues, Jan Karremans, Pavlo Golub and Antonin Houska to the 16th Prague Developer Conference. It was my first time at P2D2 which made me indeed curious. 

Location and Hotel

My last visit in Prague was in December to attend pgconf.eu. Back then, there was no need to leave the building as everything was organized there: from parking to all the meals, the event itself, and our accommodation were all located under the same roof. This time, however, everything was different. We stayed at the Hotel Silenzio situated on a small hill, with small sidewalks leading towards the city center. This made the visit a different experience. The urge to leave the building gave us the chance to soak up the real Prague atmosphere on our walks to the conference and various dinners.

The Conference

The social part began with the Speakers Dinner one day before the conference. Luckily, speakers could take someone along, so I took the chance and attended as a +1 :), which was a good opportunity to get to know the speakers (those who present) and to have a chat with them.

The conference itself was held at ČVUT FIT, the Fakulta informačních technologií ČVUT v Praze, which is a university for IT professionals. By the way, a great choice of the organizers for this event studentsas. Students got attracted by the conference bustle and had the opportunity to catch a glimpse. 

We picked up our badges at the registration desk at around 8 am and took the opportunity to greet one of our partners, initMax, that sponsored P2D2 2024. Over the day, around 250 participants attended, which was quite a large turnout.

Talks at P2D2 2024

There was a track full of talks about PostgreSQL in Czech and English. Besides some networking, I attended some interesting English presentations. From a non-fully technical perspective (as I lead the CYBERTEC Marketing Team), I really appreciated Boriss Mejias' (from EDB) talk with some well-placed heavy metal festival experiences related to PostgreSQL titled "Understanding consistency in PostgreSQL replication" and I would also like to acknowledge Gülçin Yıldırım Jelínek’ (also from EDB) on "Bringing vectors to PostgreSQL with pgvector" as it was well explained - even for me with less PostgreSQL knowledge. I wish I’d have attended their workshop as well. 

Our CYBERTEC talks by Jan Karremans and Pavlo Golub were certainly very interesting too, although they came as no surprise as I've already seen their presentations in the internal review process :). Their talks were recorded. I’ll update this blog post as soon as they are online so that you can form your own opinion. 

Networking @P2D2 2024

During the breaks, there was a lively exchange about the lectures on PostgreSQL at small standing tables in the community area. Even though the audience had the opportunity to ask questions at the end of each talk, many topics required time to sit. These breaks were an opportunity to get a coffee and address these questions.

Since the PostgreSQL community is spread all over the world, chummy members met there to talk face to face - no matter what company they belong to. One of the main reasons why I like this community so much is the social cohesion!

Conclusion

What a strong community! From the speakers' dinner to the conference and the dinner itself, you could feel the electric vibe between the participants, a contagious feeling. This was probably also due to the good organization. 

The drive home from Prague left me in a rueful mood. I would even go so far to call it conference blues. It is so easy to become addicted to the community and the vibrant atmosphere there, something that I will definitely miss. What an experience!