Tuesday's meeting: Ball of Mud, Folder-stuffing party

All,

When: Tuesday, September 11, 2007 at 7:30 PM
Folder-stuffing: 6:15 PM to 7:15 PM
Topic: Big Ball of Mud Database Projects

Where: Casa Donde
2500B Magnolia Street
Oakland, CA 94607-2410
+1 415 235 3778

Free thai food, and maybe drink, will be available, but only if you RSVP!
http://postgresql.meetup.com/1/calendar/6143101/

Also, use this list or Meetup to ask/offer rides from Oakland 19th Street
BART.

Immediately before Tuesday's "Big Ball of Mud" presentation we're going to
have a 1-hour folder-stuffing* session. This starts at 6:15pm, and
volunteers who help us stuff the folders get free PostgreSQL t-shirts (or
your pick of other geek shirts I've accumulated).

These are the big blue elephant folders full of information about PostgreSQL
which we've been handing out at conferences. They've been a big success in
making our project look more professional and giving potential users what
they really want to know. But, they involve stuffing two brochures and 9
company flyers into a folder, which means lots of volunteer work. So, help
out PostgreSQL and get a free t-shirt. (Also, if your company already
contributes code, money or hardware to PostgreSQL and you want to put a flyer
in the folder, notify me now, and bring them to Casa Donde by 6pm)

Following that, Fred Moyer will discuss techniques for handling the Big Ball
of Mud, that haphazardly grown, ill-documented, fragile, and messy code bases
that we've all had to deal with. His talk focuses on how to test and clean up
BBOMs, paying off technical debt so you can add features again without fear
of the code breaking. We'll probably follow that with a round table of
techniques people have used to deal with projects and databases suffering
from incremental development.

Please RSVP! See you there!

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL @ Sun
San Francisco