Speaker photo for Elizabeth Garrett Christensen

Interview with Elizabeth Garrett Christensen

Talks

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Could you briefly introduce yourself?

I’m Elizabeth Christensen and I work with the engineers at Crunchy on writing blogs, docs, and tutorials for the developer community. I love learning and working with Postgres and the open source developer community.

How do you engage with the PostgreSQL Community?

I volunteer for the US PostgreSQL Association and help them a bit with content and community events. I also host a Postgres user group for the Kansas City area. I attend developer conferences regularly so I’m able to see lots of folks in the greater community.

Have you enjoyed previous PostgreSQL Europe conferences, either as an attendee or as a speaker?

This will be my first time attending a conference outside the US for Crunchy and I’m so excited! I’m really hoping to get to NodicPGDay some day. I lived in Sweden for several years and would love to go back and visit.

What will your talk be about, exactly? Why this topic?

My talk is for people brand new to using PostGIS, the geospatial extension for PostgreSQL. PostGIS lets you store and work with geospatial data and maps really easily. I really like PostGIS because there’s so much open data available and it's really easy to get started with. I also really like that PostGIS is available to so many people in data, research, and other fields. It's a really great place to get started in Postgres if you’re new.

What is the audience for your talk?

The audiecce is people brand new to Postgres or PostGIS. I really like doing education to new and even non-technical audiences. I think that education for newbies is really important to create a more diverse technical community in general.

Which other talk at this year’s conference would you like to see?

I’m excited about Documentation: Let’s make it better, now, together! I have thought about contributing to Postgres documentation but haven’t yet. I’m curious to see what tips the speaker has. I’m also interested to hear Takeaways from the First 6 Months of Hacking on Postgres. I’m really curious about the perceptions of what Postgres seems like for new developers and what the software itself and the community can do in the future to help people getting started.

Which measure, action, feature or activity would - in your eyes - help to accelerate the adoption of PostgreSQL?

I would like to see easier tools for getting started with Postgres for the brand new user. I think there’s a lot of overhead in compiling it, adding extensions, and building tools. I’d like to see more out of the box Postgres options where people can get started without all the headache.