Open Source Bridge

Excerpt

Description

Do you have what it takes to succeed as a software consultant? Or will you crash and burn out in an avalanche of missed deadlines, overdue bills and litigious former clients? Learn the 21 rules and you have a much better chance of surviving, or even succeeding.

In this lightning seminar, Josh Berkus, a freelance database consultant of 15 years’ experience, will teach you about client management, contracting, estimates, project management, and billing. While not a complete education on running a consulting business, these rules of thumb have been popular and useful to freelancers around the world for years.

Don’t go tear your hair out or go bankrupt … learn the rules.

Tags

business, contracting, consultant

Speaker

• 

  Josh Berkus

  PostgreSQL Project
  • Website: http://www.pgexperts.com/
  • Blog: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/database-soup
  • Twitter: fuzzychef

  Biography

  Josh Berkus is best known as a Core Team member of the world-spanning PostgreSQL project. He is CEO of PostgreSQL Experts, Inc. and in his 12 years as a database consultant he has worked with CouchDB, MySQL, Oracle, and MSSQL Server as well as Postgres, and is heavily involved in many OSS communities, including BIRT, OSCON, OSfA, Noisebridge and more. He’s also a potter and a mean cook.

  Sessions

  • * Give a Great Tech Talk
    • Title: Give a Great Tech Talk
    • Track: Culture
    • Room: St. Johns
    • Time: 10:00 – 11:45am
    • Excerpt:

      Why do so many technical presentations suck? Make sure that yours
      doesn’t. Josh Berkus and Ian Dees will show you how to share your
      ideas with your audience by speaking effectively and (when the
      situation warrants it) showing your code.

    • Speakers: Josh Berkus, Ian Dees
  • * Relational vs. Non-Relational
    • Title: Relational vs. Non-Relational
    • Track: Cooking
    • Room: Morrison
    • Time: 2:30 – 3:15pm
    • Excerpt:

      What kind of database do you need?

      Thanks to new database projects like CouchDB, TokyoCabinet, Solr and others, there are more non-relational database options available than ever for developers. Yet good information on how to choose what kind of database you need is still scarce. We’ll cure that in this talk.

    • Speakers: Josh Berkus
  • * Introduction to PostgreSQL
    • Title: Introduction to PostgreSQL
    • Track: Cooking
    • Room: Broadway
    • Time: 1:30 – 2:15pm
    • Excerpt:

      Interested in using PostgreSQL for you next project, or migrating to it? This tutorial will go over the basics of PostgreSQL administration and database application design.

    • Speakers: Josh Berkus, Christophe Pettus