[00:00.000 --> 00:21.760]  So, welcome to the PostgreSQL Dev Room. If you just got here, you missed all the early
[00:21.760 --> 00:29.840]  morning excitement. Can I please ask you, because this is a very loud room, take care
[00:29.840 --> 00:36.560]  with the seats, because they're very loud, and please silence your phones. Now, can we
[00:36.560 --> 00:43.400]  please welcome Claire Giordano, who's going to speak about PostgreSQL's blog posts and
[00:43.400 --> 00:55.480]  how to give them an outsize impact. I have to get my phone so that I can take a selfie
[00:55.480 --> 01:01.320]  at some point in this talk. All right, so how many of you, is it your first day of
[01:01.320 --> 01:06.120]  FOSDOM or your second? How many of you are here for your first day of FOSDOM? Okay, most
[01:06.120 --> 01:12.360]  of you were here yesterday. Yeah, and I love that it's not freezing cold this year. It's
[01:12.360 --> 01:18.880]  actually comfortable. All right, well, I thank you for coming. This is my third FOSDOM, my
[01:18.880 --> 01:25.400]  second time giving a talk here in the PostgreSQL Dev Room. Boris, I promise to stay in the
[01:25.400 --> 01:33.000]  proper range now. Okay, am I good? All right, so I'm here to talk to you about how to give
[01:33.000 --> 01:43.200]  your PostgreSQL blog posts an outsize impact. And I'm really happy to talk about it, because
[01:43.200 --> 01:50.240]  sharing information about PostgreSQL and our projects, new features, new capabilities is
[01:50.240 --> 01:55.120]  just super important to growing the community and having more people learn about it, use
[01:55.120 --> 02:01.480]  it, become developers on it. So before I dive in a bit about my background, I started my
[02:01.480 --> 02:07.160]  career as an engineer in the developer tools group at Sun Microsystems. I worked on a predecessor
[02:07.280 --> 02:13.720]  to a predecessor to modern day GitHub and Git. And then I spent many years as an engineering
[02:13.720 --> 02:19.200]  manager in the kernel group at Sun. Before moving into product management, product marketing
[02:19.200 --> 02:25.960]  roles, I think of myself as a writer. That's why I care about blogging. And about six years
[02:25.960 --> 02:32.200]  ago, I joined a small startup in San Francisco, well, not so small, but a startup nonetheless
[02:32.240 --> 02:38.640]  called Citus Data. Have any of you heard of Citus? Okay, so some of you didn't raise your
[02:38.640 --> 02:42.880]  hands, but I know you've heard of Citus. And then after a couple years, we were acquired
[02:42.880 --> 02:51.000]  by Microsoft. So I work at Microsoft. And this is a screenshot of the GitHub repo for
[02:51.000 --> 02:56.080]  the Citus database extension, which is an open source extension that I spend most of
[02:56.080 --> 03:01.840]  my days working on. And I put the screenshot there with the stars over in the right, because
[03:01.880 --> 03:08.160]  I'm on a mission to, you know, make sure people who know it, use it, like it, our supporters
[03:08.160 --> 03:15.160]  of it actually do go and give it a star so I can bump that number up and get some validation.
[03:15.160 --> 03:20.320]  So the reason I created this talk is I ran across this quote somewhere where somebody
[03:20.320 --> 03:26.480]  said about Postgres that it's not just open source, it's open engineering. And I'm looking
[03:26.480 --> 03:31.320]  at Joe Conway. Did that quote come from you? Or was it Peter Eisentraut? I'm not sure who
[03:31.360 --> 03:36.920]  it was, but it's a fabulous quote. And so I thought about, well, why not share the techniques
[03:36.920 --> 03:42.600]  and the best practices that we use, not just in engineering, but in engineering the blog
[03:42.600 --> 03:47.840]  posts and the content that we create? Now, before I dive in, I have to give you a warning.
[03:47.840 --> 03:52.080]  There's a lot of dog illustrations in this talk. And that's because I'm here in Brussels
[03:52.080 --> 03:56.400]  and back home in California is my chocolate Labrador named Zuka. So I don't know, I had
[03:56.400 --> 04:01.300]  to inspire myself to think of her as I was working on it. Now, the talk is going to have
[04:01.340 --> 04:08.340]  two parts. The first is what you write, the actual kind of drafting of the blog post.
[04:08.420 --> 04:14.140]  And the second is, well, where you send it, who you send it to. And in marketing speak,
[04:14.140 --> 04:19.500]  that means we're going to talk about content. And then we're going to talk about distribution.
[04:19.500 --> 04:24.900]  Now let's dive into content first. And in this area, I want to start with you in your
[04:24.900 --> 04:29.940]  frame of mind when you're creating these blog posts. And then we'll talk a bit about the
[04:29.940 --> 04:36.940]  edit cycle after that, which is also super important. And I think my first tip for you
[04:37.780 --> 04:43.860]  when you're creating a blog is to write with a specific reader in mind. Now, and think of
[04:43.860 --> 04:48.260]  who's this person that you want to read it? What kind of skills do they have? What kind
[04:48.260 --> 04:53.820]  of problems? See, those are those that, sorry. The seats are really loud in here, aren't they?
[04:53.820 --> 04:58.980]  Yeah, welcome. I'm glad you're here. Who do you want to read it? What are their skills?
[04:59.020 --> 05:04.100]  What are their interests? And write to that individual. This may seem obvious, but for
[05:04.100 --> 05:11.100]  a lot of us, when we try to write to this vague, big, amorphous world out there, the
[05:12.540 --> 05:17.660]  blog post kind of ends up like hotel food. And I mean bad, boring hotel food, where it's
[05:17.660 --> 05:23.660]  trying to appeal to everybody and doesn't dare have any strong flavors or strong spices
[05:23.740 --> 05:29.820]  and ends up being very bland. So write to that specific person as you're creating it.
[05:29.820 --> 05:35.580]  And then the second tip is also obvious. Pick good topics. But I put it up there because
[05:35.580 --> 05:39.740]  in many, well, there've been many conversations I've had with people where they've said, you
[05:39.740 --> 05:43.940]  know, I want to start blogging. I want to start sharing my expertise, but I don't know
[05:43.940 --> 05:50.140]  what to write about. And so I just want to tell you that the world, the internet is full
[05:50.180 --> 05:55.660]  of inspiration of what to write about. And every time you send an internal email answering
[05:55.660 --> 06:02.500]  a question or somebody comes, if you're working in an office or with a team of people in person,
[06:02.500 --> 06:08.860]  someone comes in and asks you a question. Maybe your answer is good fodder for a post.
[06:08.860 --> 06:14.900]  Maybe more than that person has that question and it should be shared more broadly. So whether
[06:14.940 --> 06:21.940]  it's Stack Overflow as well, or the Postgres Slack, the IRC channel, Reddit, there's a lot
[06:22.140 --> 06:26.860]  of, there's different subreddits. There's one for Postgres, but there's other ones
[06:26.860 --> 06:31.700]  that deal with databases and distributed systems as well. There's questions that come up there
[06:31.700 --> 06:37.700]  that might make a good blog topic too. And then just make sure those blogs are interesting.
[06:37.700 --> 06:43.180]  Like that, again, not bland, not boring. Okay. And the third tip when you think about your
[06:43.220 --> 06:48.900]  frame of mind is to have empathy for your reader. That's probably the most important
[06:48.900 --> 06:55.380]  takeaway from this talk is to have empathy. And so what does empathy mean? It does not
[06:55.380 --> 07:02.380]  mean sympathy. I love this cartoon from a human cloud of gaping void. And on the left, he
[07:03.100 --> 07:10.100]  describes empathy as, I feel your pain. I physically feel how you feel. I really understand
[07:11.100 --> 07:16.420]  and have empathy for your situation. Whereas sympathy is just, oh, I'm sorry that you're
[07:16.420 --> 07:23.420]  in pain, which is kind of just words. It doesn't have the same impact. So the goal is to have
[07:24.180 --> 07:29.780]  empathy be your true north. And that means you're going to care about the reader more
[07:29.780 --> 07:35.220]  than you care about yourself. It means you're going to put in some extra effort in creating
[07:35.220 --> 07:40.460]  the blog post and recognize that they're busy. They're in a hurry. So you should write and
[07:40.460 --> 07:45.460]  create this post so that it's easy for them to quickly get answers to their questions.
[07:45.460 --> 07:49.980]  And just remember that they don't know what you know. So when you work with a team of
[07:49.980 --> 07:54.780]  people who have similar knowledge, expertise and skills, we use a lot of shortcuts. Like
[07:54.780 --> 08:00.220]  we use acronyms and we don't have to define or explain concepts. We all understand. Anybody
[08:00.260 --> 08:06.380]  who works with Citus understands what sharding is, for example. But the reader doesn't necessarily
[08:06.380 --> 08:11.940]  know what you know. So taking a few moments to define a term or explain a concept or link
[08:11.940 --> 08:18.940]  to a background blog is super helpful to them. All right. So let's dive into specific tactics
[08:19.460 --> 08:24.860]  that you can use to apply empathy and really care about your readers. And the first is
[08:24.940 --> 08:31.300]  to make your blog posts scannable. I grabbed these two big, chunky, dense paragraphs from
[08:31.300 --> 08:36.700]  the internet as an example of what you should not do. Like I can't even bring myself to
[08:36.700 --> 08:41.620]  read them. They're in my talk and I've not read those paragraphs because it's just blah,
[08:41.620 --> 08:48.620]  blah, blah. Like my brain cannot embrace whatever they're trying to tell me. So because
[08:48.780 --> 08:54.740]  people are in a hurry, you got to make it easy for them to find the part of the post that
[08:54.740 --> 09:01.740]  will help them. And one mistake a lot of people make is they, it's okay. It's totally okay.
[09:03.180 --> 09:08.220]  They assume someone's going to read the whole post from the beginning to the end, but they're
[09:08.220 --> 09:14.180]  not. They're going to jump around. Maybe they'll start in the middle. And so when I think about
[09:14.180 --> 09:18.180]  how to make things scannable, there's a bunch of techniques that I just wanted to point
[09:18.220 --> 09:24.220]  out that are super useful. The first is to have section headlines that break up the post,
[09:24.220 --> 09:29.620]  H2s, if you will. But they should not be subject titles. And we'll talk about that in a moment.
[09:29.620 --> 09:34.420]  They should actually be headlines, like headlines you'd see in a newspaper. Use bullets. Bullets
[09:34.420 --> 09:40.380]  are fabulous for scanning. If the bullets are multi-line bullets, put a bold font prefix
[09:40.380 --> 09:44.700]  at the beginning of each one, just like two, three words that tells them what that bullet
[09:44.740 --> 09:49.900]  is about. And then most people will just read those bold font prefixes. And they may not
[09:49.900 --> 09:55.020]  read the rest of it if it's not what they're looking for. Short sentences and short paragraphs
[09:55.020 --> 10:02.020]  are your friend. White space is also a big friend. And then tables are super helpful too.
[10:02.380 --> 10:06.620]  I was reviewing a blog post with someone once, and they were sharing just three or four pieces
[10:06.620 --> 10:12.060]  of performance benchmark data, but they were doing it in sentences, like in the copy. And
[10:12.100 --> 10:16.820]  when we took those numbers out and we put them in a super small, like two by three table,
[10:16.820 --> 10:22.700]  all of a sudden the conclusion just popped, whereas before it was hidden in the paragraphs.
[10:22.700 --> 10:29.700]  So I said we'd talk about the section headlines, the H2s, a few seconds ago. So here's a couple
[10:29.860 --> 10:35.540]  of examples. And these are actual examples from actual blogs that I worked on with people.
[10:35.900 --> 10:42.420]  And in this first example, literally the H2 said example, which is nice. It tells you,
[10:42.420 --> 10:48.340]  okay, we're going to look at something that will help show me what we're talking about.
[10:48.340 --> 10:52.980]  But in fact it's much better if it were to say a real world example, a multi-tenant to-do
[10:52.980 --> 10:59.180]  application. It gives more specifics about what's going to be in that section. Similarly
[10:59.180 --> 11:04.620]  I was working on a blog post with, I don't even remember who it was with, and the H2
[11:04.700 --> 11:08.900]  just said PG Bouncer, which is great. It tells you that section is about PG Bouncer. That's
[11:08.900 --> 11:14.060]  useful. But it's even more useful if we tell you in the H2 that this is about how to set
[11:14.060 --> 11:20.580]  up PG Bouncer. And oh, by the way, it's our preferred connection pooler. So just being
[11:20.580 --> 11:25.580]  more specific can help the reader, and it primes their brain as to what they're going
[11:25.580 --> 11:32.580]  to get, or tells them whether to even read that section. Okay. Now, not everybody is
[11:33.340 --> 11:36.660]  a reader. So I already said people aren't going to read the whole thing. They're going to
[11:36.660 --> 11:42.300]  bounce around. But people's brains process information differently. So how many of you
[11:42.300 --> 11:48.620]  think of yourselves as being visual in how you process information? Okay. And how many
[11:48.620 --> 11:51.940]  of you, when you're explaining something to a colleague, the first thing you do is jump
[11:51.940 --> 11:58.940]  up to a whiteboard and start sketching diagrams? Yeah. Okay. So to make your blog post more
[11:59.540 --> 12:04.980]  accessible to more people, it shouldn't just be paragraphs and words and sentences, but
[12:04.980 --> 12:09.420]  obviously a picture speaks a thousand words. So including a diagram in there and taking
[12:09.420 --> 12:15.900]  the time to figure out what should that diagram be can make a world of difference. I gave
[12:15.900 --> 12:20.460]  you the example of tables before. Those are super helpful when you're sharing numeric
[12:20.460 --> 12:26.340]  information. For those of us who work on cloud services, sometimes having that screenshot
[12:26.340 --> 12:32.700]  of whatever is going on in the UI can be really helpful. And then code blocks as well.
[12:32.700 --> 12:35.940]  Particularly when you're talking about some new capability or trying to show someone how
[12:35.940 --> 12:42.420]  to use something, that code block is huge. So the variety of formats can help. I took
[12:42.420 --> 12:48.540]  this screenshot, don't worry about it, from a blog post that David Rowley wrote last year
[12:48.540 --> 12:54.460]  about speeding up sort performance in Postgres 15. He's one of the Postgres contributors
[12:54.980 --> 13:01.420]  that works on my team at Microsoft. And without this chart, the blog post would have been
[13:01.420 --> 13:06.500]  nice. It would have been good, but it was so much more powerful when you show visually
[13:06.500 --> 13:13.500]  like what the results were and how sort performance was sped up. And when you do include diagrams
[13:15.460 --> 13:22.460]  or charts, it's important to remember to put alt text in there. Not just because we care
[13:22.980 --> 13:28.660]  about people who are visually impaired and are using screen readers, but also it influences
[13:28.660 --> 13:34.300]  how your blog post will get ranked on search engines. Because alt text is one of the factors
[13:34.300 --> 13:41.060]  and things that the search engines look for. Using H2s as well can also help screen readers.
[13:41.060 --> 13:44.340]  So don't just, when you have those section headlines we talked about earlier, don't just
[13:44.340 --> 13:49.980]  like put a bold font in and make it a bigger font size. Actually change the paragraph format
[13:50.020 --> 13:56.860]  to H2 or section header or whatever it's called in your platform. And that will help those
[13:56.860 --> 14:02.180]  screen readers too. The other thing I'll say about this chart is it looked totally different
[14:02.180 --> 14:08.300]  at first. Like we iterated on it to try to figure out how do we make the story pop. Like
[14:08.300 --> 14:13.780]  we ended up pivoting it by 90 degrees, changing the title, changing how we labeled things
[14:13.780 --> 14:20.780]  and doing our best to make it drop dead easy to understand. Alright, the third technique
[14:21.660 --> 14:28.660]  in the empathy area that I want to point out is readability. And I always recommend to
[14:28.740 --> 14:34.500]  people that you write at the third or fifth grade level. Maybe sixth grade is okay. But
[14:34.500 --> 14:41.500]  a lot of us in engineering, we're trained to write in very formal, academic, dry, and
[14:44.500 --> 14:50.780]  tones of voice. And even at the 16th grade level, at the 14th grade level. And that's
[14:50.780 --> 14:54.940]  hard for people to read, especially when they're in a hurry and trying to get something done.
[14:54.940 --> 14:59.860]  So if you simplify your writing, that can make a big difference. This is a screenshot
[14:59.860 --> 15:06.220]  of a tool that I use called the Hemingway app. And if you go and you put copy from your
[15:06.220 --> 15:10.660]  blog post in there, it'll tell you what grade level. It's written that and will give you
[15:10.660 --> 15:16.620]  some specific suggestions about how you can simplify your writing. And that assumes your
[15:16.620 --> 15:22.340]  writing in English. I don't know if it has support for other languages. Other people
[15:22.340 --> 15:29.340]  are big fans of Grammarly and I'm glad you're here. And so, absolutely recommend this.
[15:30.300 --> 15:34.940]  The other aspect of readability that I want to point out, I always recommend people write
[15:34.940 --> 15:41.940]  in a conversational tone of voice. Again, going back to how we were taught to write,
[15:42.180 --> 15:49.180]  it was very formal, pedantic even, official, academic. But actually when people are in
[15:50.180 --> 15:57.180]  a hurry, their brains are wired for conversation. So if you write in that easy, accessible conversational
[15:57.180 --> 16:00.820]  tone of voice, you're going to have more people recommending your blog post. You're
[16:00.860 --> 16:05.140]  going to have more people actually reading it versus just bouncing and leaving, deciding
[16:05.140 --> 16:10.620]  oh, this is too much work or oh, the worst is I'll read this later, which of course most
[16:10.620 --> 16:17.220]  people don't ever do. So part of writing in a conversational tone of voice, like how do
[16:17.220 --> 16:22.980]  you do it? I always tell people to imagine that they're sitting over coffee and trying
[16:22.980 --> 16:28.060]  to explain to another engineer or developer how this thing works or whatever the topic
[16:28.100 --> 16:32.100]  is. And maybe that person is their best friend and they're going for a job interview and
[16:32.100 --> 16:36.620]  they really need to understand. How are you going to explain it to them so that it makes
[16:36.620 --> 16:41.020]  sense so that they get it? That's the kind of conversational tone of voice that you want
[16:41.020 --> 16:48.020]  to employ. And then I also recommend people write in the second person you. And that's
[16:48.340 --> 16:54.100]  because your reader doesn't care about yourself. They don't care about the author. They care
[16:54.140 --> 17:00.640]  about themselves. So when you speak to you, when you write about you and in the screenshot
[17:00.640 --> 17:05.100]  here I put like little, I don't know if you can see them. Oh yes, you can. The yellow
[17:05.100 --> 17:10.900]  boxes around all the instances of the word you. And a lot of times in the first draft,
[17:10.900 --> 17:15.340]  the word you won't even show up. People will just say, I, I, we, we, I'm doing this. This
[17:15.340 --> 17:20.460]  is all about me. Kind of like in the beginning of this talk when I introduced myself. Probably
[17:20.500 --> 17:25.220]  a lot of you didn't care. You just wanted to get to the meat of the topic. So speak
[17:25.220 --> 17:31.660]  to you and write in that conversational tone of voice. So I'm a big fan of checklists.
[17:31.660 --> 17:36.900]  I don't know how many of you have read this wonderful book by Atul Gawande called The Checklist
[17:36.900 --> 17:43.900]  Manifesto. Anybody? Oh, cool. Strong recommend. It's a really wonderful book and it talks
[17:44.900 --> 17:50.700]  about using checklists not just in his field, which is medicine and surgery, but also in
[17:50.700 --> 17:57.060]  other fields like airline pilots and people in charge of big, massive like skyscraper
[17:57.060 --> 18:03.140]  construction projects. Anyway, so a big fan of checklists. So here's a checklist that summarizes
[18:03.140 --> 18:09.140]  the three things we just talked about regarding scannability, variety of formats, and readability.
[18:09.580 --> 18:15.460]  All right. And now we're going to pivot away from you and your frame of mind and empathy
[18:15.460 --> 18:22.460]  and talk about the edit cycle. So I think the first thing I tell people who are starting
[18:22.460 --> 18:28.460]  off blogging or even experts who are looking to get better is to just embrace the edit
[18:28.460 --> 18:35.460]  cycle and the, the iteration. You have to do the work. Now, I suppose that's not true
[18:35.460 --> 18:40.580]  for everybody. I do know some people who are kind of famous and they can write really
[18:40.580 --> 18:47.580]  crappy blog posts and people are going to give it a plus one and, and promote it and
[18:48.540 --> 18:51.820]  they'll get a lot of traffic even though it's not actually very helpful. It's not actually
[18:51.820 --> 18:56.220]  very good, but they're famous. And so they get that kind of benefit. But for most of
[18:56.220 --> 19:02.820]  us mere humans, we've got to do the work to make something usable by people. I'm a fan
[19:02.860 --> 19:09.460]  of this writer named David Perrell and I grabbed this screenshot of a tweet that he did and
[19:09.460 --> 19:13.420]  you don't really need to read the words, but the visual kind of tells the story that when
[19:13.420 --> 19:18.940]  you are creating a blog and probably the same as true for coding, you end up going down
[19:18.940 --> 19:23.180]  a lot of dead ends and that's what all those gray lines are meant to represent. They're
[19:23.180 --> 19:26.940]  things that you thought were going to be part of the blog, ways of explaining that you thought
[19:26.940 --> 19:31.940]  were going to be useful, but they weren't and you had to throw them away. And it's only
[19:32.020 --> 19:38.020]  in, and these are his words, good writing is only obvious in retrospect. And so that
[19:38.020 --> 19:45.020]  purple line could not have been found without all those gray dead ends. And yeah, so you've
[19:45.980 --> 19:51.220]  got to edit. And the other thing that is important is that it's okay for your first draft to
[19:51.220 --> 19:58.220]  suck. So especially with people who are creating blogs for the first time, they'll get a little
[19:58.340 --> 20:03.340]  bit stuck because they're not sure how to say it. And they literally, their hands are
[20:03.340 --> 20:09.840]  frozen over the keyboard. And you just have to recognize that dirty little secret that
[20:09.840 --> 20:16.020]  everybody's first drafts suck. And that's okay. So once you give yourself permission
[20:16.020 --> 20:22.700]  to write something bad, then you're well on your way to having a good end result. So the
[20:22.700 --> 20:29.540]  other quote people often use is perfect is the enemy of the good. These images of these
[20:29.540 --> 20:34.980]  artists though are kind of interesting because when you think about artists, because their
[20:34.980 --> 20:40.720]  initial sketches are typically not shared with a team, they feel free. They don't have
[20:40.720 --> 20:47.560]  anybody judging them and they can go scribble and draw and experiment and create some really
[20:47.600 --> 20:54.600]  amazing things by exploring in ways that they wouldn't be able to do if they felt like they
[20:54.680 --> 21:00.080]  had an audience right there. So the technique that some people do is they just low, okay,
[21:00.080 --> 21:04.240]  I'm not going to show my first draft that anybody, I'm going to wait until it's a second
[21:04.240 --> 21:07.760]  draft and it's a little more refined. And maybe that's what you have to tell yourself.
[21:07.760 --> 21:12.480]  I just write crappy first drafts and I'm not embarrassed by it because I know the end result
[21:12.520 --> 21:19.520]  is going to be really fricking good. All right. Feedback is gift. So if you find good reviewers,
[21:20.160 --> 21:27.160]  they're gold and say thank you and have gratitude for it. I've worked with some brilliant bloggers
[21:28.280 --> 21:33.160]  in my career who, if you ask them to review your post, you'll get, oh yeah, it looks fine,
[21:33.160 --> 21:37.280]  looks pretty good. You got some typo in the fourth paragraph, but other than that, it looks
[21:37.360 --> 21:44.360]  good. And that's generally not complete feedback. And maybe they didn't even read the thing.
[21:44.800 --> 21:50.800]  So hopefully you can find people who will look at what's missing or who will give you
[21:50.800 --> 21:56.800]  specific actionable ideas for how you could improve it or flag the things that are confusing.
[21:56.800 --> 22:02.160]  Now, one of the things I do, particularly when I'm working with folks who are super
[22:02.160 --> 22:08.240]  crazy busy and who I know are really carving out part of their weekend time or their evening
[22:08.240 --> 22:13.800]  time to give me feedback, is I will ask them to focus on something specific. So like if
[22:13.800 --> 22:19.000]  you're giving some important post out to three engineers, give them each a different part,
[22:19.000 --> 22:23.720]  a different assignment. Hey, Joe, I want you to look at the conclusion and make sure I
[22:23.720 --> 22:29.280]  didn't miss anything. Bertron, can you look at the diagrams in the middle and make sure
[22:29.360 --> 22:34.960]  that they're clear? I'm just calling you guys out because you're on the back row, so hello.
[22:34.960 --> 22:40.360]  So giving people those areas of focus can help. I don't know who to attribute this screenshot
[22:40.360 --> 22:46.360]  here, but I have used it with people and it's super effective. I'll tell them to flag anything
[22:46.360 --> 22:53.360]  that's confusing, flag anything where their mind starts to wander, because when their
[22:53.360 --> 22:59.160]  mind wanders, then that means they're probably bored and I need to go cut or fix it or do
[22:59.360 --> 23:06.360]  something to flag maybe the 10% that they love that I better not throw away in my next
[23:06.480 --> 23:11.840]  edit cycle and then scribble any ideas for what might be missing. And people have loved
[23:11.840 --> 23:16.840]  that technique and have said thank you to me for making it easy for them to help me.
[23:16.840 --> 23:23.840]  Okay, fifth tip in the edit cycle is just be willing to get your scissors out and to
[23:24.160 --> 23:31.160]  cut and to cut. Are any of you Stephen King fans? One, two, three, four, half, four and
[23:35.040 --> 23:42.040]  a half, okay. So Stephen King wrote, I'm actually not a big fan of his horror books, but over
[23:43.160 --> 23:47.280]  the years I've found some of his books that I absolutely love and the one I love the most
[23:47.280 --> 23:53.280]  is called On Writing. And we all know if you work in engineering and you work with software
[23:53.280 --> 23:58.680]  that a big part of your job is communicating, right? It is explaining things to other people.
[23:58.680 --> 24:02.480]  So if you've ever wanted to get better at writing, that is the book to read and it's
[24:02.480 --> 24:08.480]  part autobiographical and was written by, well he wrote it as he was recovering from
[24:08.480 --> 24:14.280]  an accident where he'd been hit by a car, but it's part about the craft of writing.
[24:14.280 --> 24:20.280]  And in it he has a quote that says, kill your darlings, kill your darlings even when it breaks
[24:20.280 --> 24:26.720]  your egocentric little scribbler's heart. Kill your darlings. And I just love that quote.
[24:26.720 --> 24:31.880]  A lot of people misquote it as kill your babies, which I think is rather grotesque. But the
[24:31.880 --> 24:37.000]  idea is you've got to be willing to throw stuff away. And if you can't bring yourself
[24:37.000 --> 24:40.640]  to throw stuff away and delete it, one of the things I do is I just put a section at
[24:40.640 --> 24:45.200]  the bottom of the document called the cutting room floor and I just move stuff down there.
[24:45.200 --> 24:49.200]  And then I somehow feel better about it. Like well I'll be able to go back and get it if
[24:49.200 --> 24:55.420]  I decide it really should be reinstated. That never happens. It never gets reinstated. But
[24:55.420 --> 25:01.640]  psychologically putting it in the cutting room floor for me is better than killing it. But
[25:01.640 --> 25:05.320]  you just got to be willing to cut. Otherwise people will get bored and they will leave
[25:05.320 --> 25:10.480]  your blog because it will be full of noise and you won't have enough signal to noise
[25:10.480 --> 25:15.440]  in that ratio. Alright, number six. Forking your blog post
[25:15.440 --> 25:21.200]  into several shorter blogs. So, um, Andres Freund, who some of you probably
[25:21.200 --> 25:26.800]  saw, he was here at Fosdome PG Day on Friday and he's probably around right now. No, he's
[25:26.800 --> 25:31.960]  probably on his way to the airport. I worked with him on some blog posts that he wrote
[25:31.960 --> 25:36.560]  over a year ago about connection scalability and postgres. And when he shared the first
[25:36.560 --> 25:42.040]  draft with me, it was really freaking long. And I didn't even have to tell him that it
[25:42.040 --> 25:46.560]  was long. He started off with, yeah, maybe I should split this into two different posts.
[25:46.560 --> 25:50.840]  Well, he ended up splitting it into three different posts. And I think all three of
[25:50.840 --> 25:56.440]  them hit front paycheck or news and they all got a ton of traffic and they were all useful.
[25:56.440 --> 26:02.400]  And I would argue that having three shorter posts made the information more accessible
[26:02.400 --> 26:09.440]  to people. People tend to have shorter amounts of time available to read or to learn. So,
[26:09.440 --> 26:14.320]  this is a technique that can work wonders for you in the edit cycle, is to cut things
[26:14.320 --> 26:19.040]  apart. And then just keeping it simple, which is really hard to do, especially when you're
[26:19.040 --> 26:25.760]  trying to explain a concept that's complicated. Um, but you know, you can, you can keep it
[26:25.760 --> 26:29.280]  simple in a lot of different ways. Like one of the things you can do is just move certain
[26:29.280 --> 26:35.200]  details into footnotes. So they're not fluttering your main points, but they're still there.
[26:35.200 --> 26:40.360]  You can also use analogies to help people understand a difficult concept, to make it
[26:40.360 --> 26:46.080]  easier for them to put that concept that, that's new to them in a mental model that
[26:46.080 --> 26:50.400]  they already have. And then of course, writing at that third or fifth grade level will help
[26:50.400 --> 26:57.480]  keep things simple as well. And then number eight, reading it out loud. So, it's interesting.
[26:57.480 --> 27:03.160]  Um, when I read, and this is true for many people, when I read something silently in
[27:03.200 --> 27:09.360]  my head, if there's a mistake in it, my brain will self correct it. And I won't even notice
[27:09.360 --> 27:15.480]  the mistake. Like it just, I'll be oblivious to it. Um, but if I read it out loud, I hear
[27:15.480 --> 27:21.720]  it immediately. It's like nails on a chalkboard. I hear it. So reading out loud is a great
[27:21.720 --> 27:28.600]  way to find errors in what you've written or to find that it's confusing or long winded.
[27:28.600 --> 27:33.120]  You almost run out of breath when you're reading it and you're like, oh, maybe I should simplify
[27:33.120 --> 27:39.920]  that or shorten it. Um, it's also a good way to assess if you've written in that conversational
[27:39.920 --> 27:46.040]  tone of voice. If when you're reading it out loud, you're like, oh, I would never say that.
[27:46.040 --> 27:51.040]  Well, then it's time to like get your red pen out and go fix it to make it more conversational.
[27:51.040 --> 27:58.160]  All right. So then the nice tip is to optimize for SEO. So most of you know SEO stands for
[27:58.160 --> 28:05.040]  search engine optimization and improving some basic SEO attributes of your post will make
[28:05.040 --> 28:10.960]  it more likely that your post will show up on that first page of search results. Um, and
[28:10.960 --> 28:16.360]  you do not need to be an SEO expert at all. You just need a few very, very basic skills
[28:16.360 --> 28:21.760]  that you can learn today. And as long as you retain them, you're good to go. Um, but I
[28:21.760 --> 28:28.000]  have to tell you first that all these, these few basic SEO tips are not worth your time
[28:28.000 --> 28:33.400]  if you don't have good content, right? If it's not scannable, if it's not readable,
[28:33.400 --> 28:39.440]  if you haven't, um, written in a conversational tone of voice, then the SEO stuff's not gonna
[28:39.440 --> 28:44.240]  help you at all. So starting with good content, there are a few things you can do. Um, and
[28:44.240 --> 28:51.240]  the first is just to spend a few extra minutes, maybe 10 minutes, 15 minutes on the title.
[28:51.320 --> 28:58.820]  Um, the title is what's gonna cause people to click or not click if they discover or
[28:58.820 --> 29:06.520]  see your blog post, um, somewhere in search results. And also the keywords in the title
[29:06.520 --> 29:13.640]  are going to affect, um, on what search results your blog is gonna show up. Um, not just the
[29:13.640 --> 29:18.480]  keywords in the title, obviously the search engines use a lot of factors. Um, but it's
[29:18.520 --> 29:25.760]  very, very important. So what I've found is I have to create at least 15 bad titles to
[29:25.760 --> 29:31.200]  come up with one good title. So, and it's interesting because a lot of times when people
[29:31.200 --> 29:36.800]  in my team will create blogs, they'll literally just create one title. And that's just the
[29:36.800 --> 29:40.440]  starting, they, they think they're at the finish point, but it's just the starting point.
[29:40.440 --> 29:45.800]  And then we riff from there to come up with other alternatives. Um, so this is an example
[29:45.800 --> 29:51.520]  of screenshot of 15 different titles that, um, Marco Slott and I were experimenting with
[29:51.520 --> 29:59.520]  and fiddling with for some blog last October, um, about the Citus 11.1 open source release.
[29:59.520 --> 30:05.000]  But, and it looks like noise. I probably should have displayed these in categories, but there
[30:05.000 --> 30:11.120]  really is a method to the madness here. Like some of these titles use Postgres as well as
[30:11.200 --> 30:15.960]  Vitus in the title for people who don't know the connection. It's an important connection.
[30:15.960 --> 30:21.960]  So, you know, maybe the title had to include both. Um, we were fiddling with, uh, different
[30:21.960 --> 30:28.080]  ways to talk about like without blocking rights or without interruption or, um, how are the
[30:28.080 --> 30:32.880]  other ways, um, using create distributed table concurrently. So using different terms to
[30:32.880 --> 30:39.880]  express the same concept, 15 minutes. Huh? I better talk faster, huh? Okay. I'll get going.
[30:39.880 --> 30:45.040]  Um, so the bottom line is don't be afraid to generate a whole bunch of titles and fiddle
[30:45.040 --> 30:49.360]  and experiment to try to come up with what the right, the right answer is. Now, there's
[30:49.360 --> 30:54.040]  three techniques for assessing once you have a list. Um, the first is, are the most important
[30:54.040 --> 30:58.840]  terms in the first 60 characters. So on a Google search results page, they will truncate
[30:58.840 --> 31:03.920]  the title after 60 characters. So don't take the most important word and put it later in
[31:03.920 --> 31:07.000]  the title because then people are never going to see it and it's not going to cause them
[31:07.040 --> 31:13.880]  to click. Um, also just, is it boring versus is it interesting? And I'll often use incognito
[31:13.880 --> 31:20.880]  browser searches to figure out, um, you know, what other things are popping up already for
[31:22.360 --> 31:28.040]  those particular search keywords in terms. And I definitely don't want to use the title
[31:28.040 --> 31:32.760]  that somebody else has already used. Like that would be a bad thing. So that's one, one reason
[31:32.760 --> 31:38.000]  to kind of compare it to what's out there in the world. All right. And then, um, a few
[31:38.000 --> 31:43.840]  more bullets here on the right hand side of things to pay attention to. Um, I will often
[31:43.840 --> 31:48.160]  advise people to avoid general terms like solution. I can't stand that one. Like why
[31:48.160 --> 31:55.160]  say solution when you could just say database or Postgres or Citus? Um, I really pay attention
[31:56.160 --> 32:01.640]  to pronouns like it and this. A lot of us like to be efficient in our writing. And so
[32:01.640 --> 32:07.800]  using it makes things sound a little bit less repetitive and I get it, but almost always
[32:07.800 --> 32:13.440]  that pronoun is introduces an ambiguity because it could be referring to this noun or maybe
[32:13.440 --> 32:18.120]  to that noun. And for somebody who's in a hurry, it stops them dead in their tracks to
[32:18.120 --> 32:21.640]  try to figure out what you're referring to and they're not quite sure what you meant.
[32:21.640 --> 32:28.640]  Um, so that's another tip. And then I try to, um, when you create, um, hyperlinks, like
[32:28.640 --> 32:35.640]  it's a really bad idea to ever use like the word here as a, as the anchor text for a hyperlink
[32:35.640 --> 32:41.240]  or anything generic. You want the, the anchor text that, you know, has the underline under
[32:41.240 --> 32:46.080]  it that links to wherever you're taking them off site to have very specific and relevant
[32:46.080 --> 32:51.480]  keywords to wherever you're taking them, not vague in general ones. And you'll, it's actually
[32:51.480 --> 32:56.480]  something that, that matters to the search engines. So those are some SEO tips, but I'm
[32:56.520 --> 33:02.120]  going to move on as quickly as I can because there's more to talk about. Um, alt text for
[33:02.120 --> 33:06.160]  graphics. I mentioned that earlier. And then, um, Google actually also cares about this
[33:06.160 --> 33:13.160]  thing called eat for author bios. And that stands for expertise, authoritativeness and
[33:13.240 --> 33:20.240]  trustworthiness. And so on your blog platform, wherever you publish, make sure that there's
[33:20.400 --> 33:25.760]  a bio description for you. And it's always, it's nice to make it fun. In my case, I would
[33:25.800 --> 33:30.640]  say that I love chocolate labradors or I love salient grease, but it's even more important
[33:30.640 --> 33:36.240]  to show your expertise and your trustworthiness. You know, um, the examples, let's see, do
[33:36.240 --> 33:41.240]  I have two examples here? Yeah. So in Marco's case, the second one down, you know, I showed
[33:41.240 --> 33:46.120]  that he has a PhD in distributed systems and that he's the lead engineer on the Citus database
[33:46.120 --> 33:51.840]  team. And also like what conferences he's spoken at. Apparently the eat, um, team of
[33:51.840 --> 33:56.200]  reviewers care a lot about conference talks. That's one of the ways they decide somebody
[33:56.200 --> 34:02.000]  is credible in a field. Um, for Thomas Monroe, who's another postgres engineer on our team,
[34:02.000 --> 34:07.600]  um, again, list what conferences that he spoke at and, um, the fact that, you know, he's
[34:07.600 --> 34:13.160]  a core developer, et cetera, et cetera. Okay. So again, another checklist. I will be publishing
[34:13.160 --> 34:20.120]  my slides afterwards. So, uh, you'll be able to grab these if you find them useful. Uh,
[34:21.000 --> 34:28.000]  I think I've got all of the editing tips here as well as the SEO tips. Cool. So now we're
[34:28.080 --> 34:33.360]  done with content, um, both you as well as the edit cycle. And I want to talk for just
[34:33.360 --> 34:38.160]  a few minutes on distribution, which is kind of how do you publish? So first I want to
[34:38.160 --> 34:42.280]  ask a question, which is, um, somebody said this to me once, we're going to know which
[34:42.280 --> 34:49.280]  blog posts are good by how much traffic they got. True show of hands. False show of hands.
[34:50.920 --> 34:57.920]  Okay. So it's, it's false. Like typically how much traffic something gets is more a factor
[34:58.600 --> 35:04.480]  of how much was it shared? How much was it promoted? Did you actually distribute it and
[35:04.480 --> 35:11.480]  get it out into the world? Um, distribution trumps content almost all of the time. So
[35:12.000 --> 35:17.520]  there's two aspects of distribution that publishing platform itself, which needs to, you need
[35:17.560 --> 35:21.760]  to be smart about that, but we're not going to talk about that today. We'll focus instead
[35:21.760 --> 35:28.760]  on how to promote your blog posts. Um, so one pro tip I always share with people is before
[35:28.760 --> 35:33.000]  you, as soon as you publish, but before you start sharing it for anybody start sharing
[35:33.000 --> 35:40.000]  it, double check what I call the unfurl of that URL. Um, that might be a slack term. So
[35:40.240 --> 35:45.320]  I'm sure there's another term for it, but basically when you share your URL on different
[35:45.320 --> 35:50.840]  platforms, the HTML metadata will get displayed, right? The HTML title, the HTML description
[35:50.840 --> 35:56.000]  as is here, title, description, as well as the OG image, right? Or the social graphic
[35:56.000 --> 36:01.080]  or the teaser graphic, different blog platforms call it different things. Um, and sometimes
[36:01.080 --> 36:05.240]  people have screwed up and they have the wrong graphic or they didn't fix their description.
[36:05.240 --> 36:10.120]  And then some of these social platforms cash the graphic in particular. So if you notice
[36:10.120 --> 36:15.400]  the mistake seconds after you tweet it out the first time, Twitter was going to catch
[36:15.400 --> 36:20.640]  that graphic for 24 to 48 hours and you can fix it, but people are still going to see
[36:20.640 --> 36:25.800]  the wrong one. So, um, it's just worth double checking that, um, before you start sharing.
[36:25.800 --> 36:31.280]  And then I always put a plug in for Planet Postgres. If your blog is about Postgres and
[36:31.280 --> 36:37.720]  it complies with all of the Planet Postgres policies, um, syndicating it there is a great
[36:37.760 --> 36:43.280]  way to get it into people's RSS feeds. And, um, also you'll see on the right here that
[36:43.280 --> 36:47.800]  there's a Planet Postgres Twitter account and on MasterDawn there's a Planet Postgres
[36:47.800 --> 36:54.800]  unofficial bot account too. And so then you can, people follow that account on MasterDawn
[36:54.840 --> 36:58.760]  or on Twitter and it's another way to reach people. So that's a fabulous way to reach
[36:58.760 --> 37:03.120]  people. And the bottom line thing is just go to where your readers are. Um, and so what
[37:03.200 --> 37:08.440]  that means for me and our team is that we end up sharing our blog posts on pretty much
[37:08.440 --> 37:15.600]  all of these different social platforms because there's no one social platform that everybody
[37:15.600 --> 37:20.760]  subscribes to. And did I add MasterDawn to this list? Oh, I need to update this and add
[37:20.760 --> 37:25.920]  MasterDawn. Um, I created this slide back in October. Things were a little bit different
[37:25.920 --> 37:31.880]  back then. But actually on most of these, um, slides I have my, my MasterDawn account
[37:31.920 --> 37:37.720]  is now listed. So Twitter is just the clear Jordan a bit, but I'm on hackyderm.io, which
[37:37.720 --> 37:42.720]  I probably mispronounced. Okay. Another tip, rinse, lather, repeat. And, and that just
[37:42.720 --> 37:47.200]  means if you're going to share it, don't be afraid to share it a few times. At different
[37:47.200 --> 37:53.240]  times a day. Like you're, the Postgres audience is global and something that you tweet in
[37:53.240 --> 37:58.560]  the morning in Europe is not going to reach people in California necessarily unless they're
[37:58.600 --> 38:04.600]  super night owls. Um, and vice versa. So I know a bunch of engineers were like, oh,
[38:04.600 --> 38:09.200]  I already tweeted it once. I don't want to pollute my, you know, my profile with it more
[38:09.200 --> 38:13.160]  than once. But if you want to reach your friends, you're going to have to hit different time
[38:13.160 --> 38:19.320]  zones. Um, and just keep in mind that only like one statistically only one to 2% of your
[38:19.320 --> 38:23.520]  Twitter followers would see a given tweet. I don't actually know what that statistic
[38:23.520 --> 38:30.520]  is on mastodon. Yeah. Devrim, do you want me to go faster? Is that? Yeah. Yeah. The number
[38:34.160 --> 38:40.640]  may be lower now. Things are definitely changing in the Twitter world. Um, an example of rinse,
[38:40.640 --> 38:47.140]  lather, repeat too. Um, uh, some of my colleagues, my boss actually was interviewed on Azure
[38:47.140 --> 38:52.000]  Friday, which is this wonderful video show put on by Scott Hanselman, who I think is
[38:52.000 --> 38:58.880]  a fabulous human being. And, um, the person in charge of the Azure Friday show tweeted
[38:58.880 --> 39:02.920]  about it multiple times, but with different graphics each time and different words each
[39:02.920 --> 39:07.920]  time. And I actually think that's a good technique because the different graphics are bound to
[39:07.920 --> 39:14.920]  appeal to different people. I mean, I suppose it's not unlike Netflix having, um, different
[39:14.920 --> 39:20.920]  graphics that they use to promote a movie and something that appeals to Boris is not necessarily
[39:20.920 --> 39:26.240]  going to be what appeals to me. So I bet we see different, um, graphics for these various
[39:26.240 --> 39:31.440]  shows. All right. Um, and you can keep your Twitter momentum by recycling tweets. Um,
[39:31.440 --> 39:35.920]  the same is true on mastodon as well. So just, you know, you can quote tweet on Twitter
[39:35.920 --> 39:42.560]  and not on mastodon yet. Um, your mileage may vary, but it's super, um, effective. And
[39:42.560 --> 39:49.400]  also having other people on the team share it. So for example, um, let's see, I think
[39:49.440 --> 39:54.120]  Devrim took something that I tweeted recently and then he quote tweeted it and it reached
[39:54.120 --> 40:00.000]  a ton more people as a result. So, um, just keep recycling it and eventually you will
[40:00.000 --> 40:05.640]  hit more people. Um, on Reddit, it's super important to be there for the Q and A. Like
[40:05.640 --> 40:10.160]  most of the moderators will say that one way promotion is considered advertising. They
[40:10.160 --> 40:16.280]  don't like that. And then you can end up getting blocked by the mods explicitly or by the bots,
[40:16.320 --> 40:21.600]  you know, sometimes by mistake. And so, but if you go in there and you make a comment
[40:21.600 --> 40:27.160]  and you say, Hey, we're here to answer questions. Let's discuss this. And you facilitate a conversation.
[40:27.160 --> 40:32.480]  That's quite welcome. And so, but then you have to be willing to participate. And, um,
[40:32.480 --> 40:37.160]  there were a ton of questions on this particular topic when we open source site is last year.
[40:37.160 --> 40:41.960]  And so Yalta had a lot of work to do to get answers to those questions. Five minutes left.
[40:42.760 --> 40:50.000]  Number seven is that karma is a two way street. So if you want your postgres colleagues or
[40:50.000 --> 40:56.400]  people who work on the same team as you to help spread the word on some blog post that
[40:56.400 --> 41:03.480]  you've written, turn the table around and help them when they've got something new and
[41:03.480 --> 41:07.680]  that they're publishing and they're trying to get it out there. And that's something
[41:07.720 --> 41:13.680]  that I think we all should do more of. The more we help amplify each other's work on
[41:13.680 --> 41:21.640]  postgres and on site is the just the more people will discover what's going on, learn about it,
[41:21.640 --> 41:27.880]  become expert in it and join the community. Again, another set of tips. And here for promotion,
[41:27.880 --> 41:32.800]  your checklist, like your mileage is going to vary. So I didn't give an explicit checklist
[41:32.800 --> 41:37.520]  because what you want to do is going to be different based on whatever part of the database
[41:37.560 --> 41:41.880]  you're working on. So you'll have to create your own promotion checklist, but hopefully these tips
[41:41.880 --> 41:47.680]  will be helpful. And I put it all together here because the devil is in the details and there
[41:47.680 --> 41:54.640]  is a lot to do. And if there's one thing you're going to remember from this talk today, it should be
[41:54.640 --> 41:59.680]  to have empathy for your readers. And if you do that, you're more likely to write a conversational
[41:59.680 --> 42:05.480]  tone of voice, speak to you, make things scannable, readable, simple, take the time to explain
[42:05.520 --> 42:11.720]  things. Prioritize and care about your reader more than you care about yourself. There were a
[42:11.720 --> 42:16.000]  whole bunch of people who helped me and inspired me in writing this talk. So I had to throw that
[42:16.000 --> 42:22.840]  slide out there to thank them. And there is a feedback link for all of the talks here in the
[42:22.840 --> 42:28.880]  Postgres dev room. So if you go into flodstem.org 2023 schedule and you go to the Postgres dev
[42:28.880 --> 42:34.040]  room track, you can see all of our talks listed, and you can click on any one of them. And in the
[42:34.040 --> 42:39.320]  bottom left, there's a submit feedback link. And I don't know how many of you generally give feedback
[42:39.320 --> 42:47.000]  on your flodstem talk. Show of hands. Okay. Let's try to increase that number this year. Because
[42:47.000 --> 42:51.760]  it's super helpful. People pour a lot of energy into creating these talks and organizing the dev
[42:51.760 --> 42:59.160]  room. And we would love to get your feedback. I put my addresses up there on mastodon and on
[42:59.160 --> 43:04.720]  Twitter. If any of you want to follow me, I will be posting a link to the slides on both of those
[43:04.720 --> 43:12.280]  accounts. And I put the site is GitHub repo on there too. So that if it is something that you
[43:12.320 --> 43:17.440]  appreciate, you can be sure to drop it a star as well. And then I know that we need to move on to the
[43:17.440 --> 43:22.680]  next talk. I think I'm out of time. So I don't know. Do we have any time for questions? Okay, so we
[43:22.680 --> 43:29.640]  have a few minutes for questions. I also wanted to say that I have some Postgres and some Citus
[43:29.640 --> 43:36.840]  database socks up here. I have 40 pairs. I also have a whole bunch of stickers of the Citus LA corn
[43:37.000 --> 43:43.320]  open source mascot too. So feel free to come and get them afterwards and wear them in good health. But
[43:43.320 --> 43:45.320]  first questions. Any?
[43:57.280 --> 44:05.080]  Hey, so great talk. So in tech, mostly most many folks have strong opinions about certain thing to a
[44:05.080 --> 44:10.600]  point like some people take religiously certain stuff. And when you're in the edit cycle, would you
[44:10.640 --> 44:17.320]  eliminate such pieces of information that will cause a sparking reaction from such folks? Or would you
[44:17.320 --> 44:23.800]  let the disagreement and see it because knowing that disagreement is information? So what should one
[44:23.800 --> 44:28.000]  do in such certain situation when they want to like have such piece of information in their blog
[44:28.000 --> 44:28.520]  post?
[44:29.040 --> 44:34.720]  I think that's a really good question. So where's the line between having an opinion on something,
[44:35.000 --> 44:41.760]  right? An opinion that might be unique in your own and being offensive, perhaps to other groups or
[44:41.760 --> 44:48.760]  hurtful or overly critical. And I kind of use the code of conducts as my guide. Like how far have I
[44:48.760 --> 44:57.040]  stepped from expressing my opinion into trashing somebody else's opinion? I think I fall back on
[44:57.040 --> 44:57.400]  that.
[44:59.000 --> 45:00.080]  Other questions?
[45:02.280 --> 45:03.800]  There's one behind you, Jimmy.
[45:05.720 --> 45:13.120]  It's a small question, but what's the different tips you can say about presenting something in your
[45:13.120 --> 45:20.240]  team to your colleagues, whatever. It's not blogging something, but still it's a lot of things you
[45:20.240 --> 45:25.440]  mentioned here and etc. Maybe you have some tips there as well to say.
[45:25.720 --> 45:31.120]  I do, but there's no way I could answer that question succinctly in the time that we have. But I will
[45:31.160 --> 45:37.840]  say that a lot of these same tips about communicating in the format of a blog also make a lot of
[45:37.840 --> 45:45.800]  sense in the format of a presentation. It's just, for example, the white space that I talked about in
[45:45.800 --> 45:51.720]  your blog, that breathing room, it's the pause when you're giving a talk. It's the taking a moment to
[45:51.720 --> 45:57.600]  speak slowly when you're giving a talk, for example. I also a big fan of spreading things out on
[45:57.600 --> 46:03.720]  multiple slides so that any one slide only says one thing versus having a lot of noise up there. So the
[46:03.720 --> 46:09.720]  signal to noise ratio lesson is the same in both two. Okay. Another question?
[46:12.240 --> 46:16.720]  Oh, and just be careful with the seats, people. When you sit down, it's very loud. Go for it.
[46:17.000 --> 46:22.600]  So I'm a personal blogger and let's say I don't have all the resources to promote on all the
[46:22.680 --> 46:31.000]  possible websites, Reddit, Hacker News, post to Twitter. So if I can choose, let's say, two or three
[46:31.000 --> 46:35.840]  like major promotion resources, what's your advice for choosing them?
[46:36.240 --> 46:40.960]  Which social platforms to pick if you only have time to publish on a few of them? Is that the question?
[46:41.160 --> 46:43.920]  Yeah, like, shall I choose Reddit over Hacker News?
[46:44.560 --> 46:49.320]  I can't prescribe that for you. What I would recommend is that you experiment, right? Because it
[46:49.320 --> 46:56.200]  depends on where your friends are, who your customers and users are, where they are. That advice
[46:56.200 --> 47:04.480]  about go to where your audience is, that's where you need to go. And so you might try these two first
[47:04.480 --> 47:09.920]  and then try these two another time. I also don't think I would just give it, give a particular
[47:09.920 --> 47:14.960]  social platform one chance because it might be the right platform for you, but you post it at the
[47:14.960 --> 47:20.200]  wrong time of day or the wrong day of week. So I think you're just going to have to experiment a
[47:20.200 --> 47:26.040]  little bit there. Thank you. Any other questions or are we out of time, Jimmy? No, we got three, two
[47:26.040 --> 47:36.560]  minutes. Okay, Karen has a question. I'll repeat the question if you want.
[47:39.560 --> 47:43.400]  Hey, thank you very much. I didn't manage to catch your talk last time you did it. So I'm really
[47:43.440 --> 47:51.680]  glad I was here today. Lots of us in IT from speaking to many people don't find it natural to
[47:51.680 --> 47:59.120]  promote ourselves or to put ourselves out there and write blog posts and, you know, promote our
[47:59.120 --> 48:06.800]  tweets and things. Have you got specific advice for that? That is a really good question. And I
[48:06.800 --> 48:13.520]  struggle with it because it's back to why I made that karma point to sometimes people also have
[48:13.520 --> 48:19.880]  trouble promoting their teammates work because that might be seen as too self-serving also. But
[48:19.880 --> 48:25.920]  the fact is, like, if we want the Postgres community to grow, if we want the information that
[48:25.920 --> 48:32.960]  we're sharing to get out there, then we kind of do have to promote it. And I don't know, I don't
[48:33.000 --> 48:40.080]  know how to really address that concern, except to suggest that you just have to let it go, right?
[48:40.080 --> 48:45.440]  We just have to do it. You have to see it as part of the job. It does become more comfortable over
[48:45.440 --> 48:51.960]  time. It's not unlike anything that with practice. And you know what will happen when you promote
[48:51.960 --> 48:57.680]  something and you get the feedback from someone, Pavlo sends you a note and says, hey, that was
[48:57.680 --> 49:02.440]  really useful. I especially like the bit about this. And then your brain starts to connect the
[49:02.440 --> 49:08.680]  dots like, oh, Pavlo wouldn't have even known about it if I hadn't shared it. Okay, maybe sharing is a
[49:08.680 --> 49:15.760]  good thing. I don't know. So you get the positive validation and that might help. Any other questions?
[49:15.760 --> 49:32.000]  How to cope with imposter syndrome is the question. And it's a really good question. I
[49:32.280 --> 49:39.840]  think a lot more people feel imposter syndrome than we realize. I bet there's a lot of speakers here at
[49:39.840 --> 49:45.280]  FOSDOM who are experts in their field, but maybe felt like imposters as they were walking into the
[49:45.280 --> 49:51.360]  building today and wondering why they're the ones giving the talk. I'm not a psychologist, so I
[49:51.360 --> 49:57.520]  don't think I have a good answer except to say that you're not alone. And everybody has a story to
[49:57.520 --> 50:04.520]  tell. And everybody has a unique point of view and lessons. And just, just, just, just, just, just,