I recently gave a talk about “Advanced Postgres”, for MENADEVS, an organisation for developers from the Middle East, thus far mainly focused on Lebanon and Syria, and founded by Constantine G. Nikolaou, among others. As this talk – my third technical talk ever – turned out fairly well, or at least significantly better than the previous two, I would like to share it with you here below!

In hindsight, I think the talk was rather “migrating a table name and some Postgres obscure features”, to be self-critical, but I did not have a whole lot of time to prepare and ponder about the topic either – less than two weeks. For a version 2.0 of this talk – which I am fairly keen to give, as I really, really like Postgres and would also like to get the experience of giving a similar talk twice – I would shorten the part on somewhat lesser-known features and include a discussion of query planner (SELECT ANALYZE) analysis and interpretation, indizes (B-tree, GiST and GIN) on single and multiple columns and what impact this can have. That would be more practical and generally applicable, for more developers. Another idea would be to talk about database configuration, or running Postgres in different environments, but I would need to learn some more about that myself first.

If you are developer from the Middle East, or just have a strong interest in the region and speak a bit of Arabic, like me, I very much would like to invite you to join MENADEVS – there’s a very active Slack community and some open-source collaboration on Github!

If you are looking for a more generally “useful” and applicable talk, or are a beginner- or intermediate level developer, I more highly recommend watching the second talk of the same meetup on Domain Driven Design, by Patrick Lewis: 

Patrick also has a good and active blog on Unix, which you can find here.

If you like to invite me to speak about Postgres (or another topic?) at your conference or meetup, or have feedback for me, ping me on Twitter!