Tag Archives: mysql

My Journey with MySQL Community and Beyond – MySQL Rockstar 2023

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After the most memorable MySQL community event, #MySQLBelgianDays2024, and earning legendary recognition from the MySQL Community team, I have decided to share some thoughts about the importance of a community. 

Previously in life

As a former enterprise DBA, I have been part of other communities strictly focused on monetary and entitlement of accomplishments. I had a chance to work on world-leading enterprises and had ability access to the most advanced technologies for both software and hardware. This journey was fun, fruitful, and rewarding for me.

In the latter half of my career, I entered the open-source community of MySQL by shifting my prior decade and a half of experience into it. 

Entry to the open-source community

When I entered this community full-time, there were several controversial discussions and assumptions about Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL, the separation of MariaDB, etc. While some of those claims had some reality, most turned out to be baseless without knowing the intentions and future. 

The importance of Percona Live events and the Oracle MySQL team’s contributions to this community, which several other open-source contributors surrounded, was my entry point. There was a significant influence from hyper-scalers, known as initially social media companies, followed by SAAS and cloud vendors.  

I have watched, followed, and strictly learned from community leaders, including influencers like Peter Zaitsev. Although open-source communities feel and look like closed-circuit groups of geeks having fun, they are very open to newcomers. But remember, communities accept contributors, not watchers. What I mean by contributors is not just coming to a company-paid trip to the event once in a blue moon. Even if you attend an event as a visitor, you can still help by promoting and getting the word out through social media and other networks. 

Where to start?

One can share ideas, code tools, and software and become a speaker. If you aren’t the type of person who can speak and present, you can help others by providing content and ideas and having them review them. Let me help you get there and recognitions will follow.

How do I start helping and becoming a part of the community?

  1. Create a public repository of the tools and code you spend time on. 
  2. Start writing blogs about your experiences and sharing content. 
  3. Become a speaker or co-speaker with the same or similar subject.
  4. Conduct webinars and post-speaking events for those who were not able to attend. Include feedback and corrections to your talk. 
  5. Create training content on recorded videos and training sites. 
  6. Coordinate or help with local meetups. 
  7. Help sponsoring events. 
  8. Encourage to send co-workers to events. 
  9. Introduce newcomers to community veterans. 
  10. Author or co-author books and booklets. 
  11. Act as an event committee member. 
  12. Help to answer questions via GitHub issues or Slack channels. 
  13. Always spread the word through social channels.

If you still can’t do any of those, help marketing colleagues carry boxes of swag and give away materials, and set up and clean up booths for the events. You can always help sales and pre-sales folks by connecting your network. 

I have to credit Laine Campbell for introducing me to and allowing me to meet the most influential leaders of the MySQL community. 

Many thanks to Peter Zaitsev for all the help, support, and openness in accepting me into the MySQL community. 

I would also like to thank the past, current, and future MySQL Community team for their hard work.  The rest of the list is too long to mention here, but they know who they are.

Congratulations to all previous MySQL Rockstars and 2023 winners. 

MySQL Cookbook 4th Edition

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A nomadic sailing dream that turns into book authoring and a new role…

The inception of the book

I want to start with a huge thank you to Sveta for her invitation to her engagement with O’Reilly as a previous author. Although I had mentioned that I had an inspiration to author a book and attempted to release a booklet in the past, this was somewhat unexpected in the midst of my first biggest pandemic. 

Unexpected and surprising developments

Let’s go back in time to the infamous covid-19 pandemic. We have been under pressure with the unknown virus with little or no hope of recovery anytime soon. I got an alert from one of the brokers about a sailboat I was interested in. After a few minutes of checking with my long-time friend Nurhan, I decide to make an offer. Unfortunately, our discussions didn’t go that smoothly, and I was informed that the boat was already sold to another buyer. I insisted on increasing the price and changing the wind direction to my side by writing a moral story to the broker, and he accepted it. Now, no flights were allowed during a total lockdown. 

The rest of the story is here. 

After three weeks of getting a special business permit, we landed in Zagreb, Croatia, and completed our purchase. The paperwork took about another three weeks to complete. That’s when I got the ping from Sveta about the possible authoring of a book. At the time, I worked at Percona as Sr. Technical Manager at the same company as Sveta. Strangely, I had an offer from another company within the same week. So I accepted to join PlanetScale as part of the Vitess Open Source project role. So now I have a boat to bring home, a new job to sign in, and a book to author. 

O’Reilly Experience

I had no prior experience authoring a technical book or working with a professional editor. The company has proven to be one of the best in the industry, working with the brightest minds and publishing hundreds of books annually. Here comes Sveta again for help while I’m planning a long pandemic-bound sailing journey and a new job with many unknowns. 

The MySQL Cookbook was initially authored by Paul DuBois and released three times. So it had massive content, and I had not gone through it in detail. Looking at the overall chapters and fast reading in 48 hours, I have decided to accept to co-author 4th release of the book. The original agreement was to update %60 of the content of the last edition. Since a significant time passed and MySQL advanced to hole new levels with MySQL 8 altering for new release would merely touch every part of the book. Not only MySQL itself, but there were also new programming languages to be added, and deprecated code had to be removed. 

Developments in making

Discussions and agreements were made based mainly on Sveta’s input on all the chapters, and I was mostly monitoring how this book could be turned into a new release. Besides the technical content and programming languages used, there was another challenge to the authors about the platform. 

It’s not a simple Word document or gdoc that had to be used, but DocBook and XML had to be mastered. After two years, I still lack the skill to do both. 

The process of authoring new chapters was more effective than rewriting or editing existing chapters. For example, the book used a different data set throughout the chapters, and we decided to change that. Finding a sample data set that is freely available and suitable for the entire book is difficult. So we had to go to multiple sources. 

The older chapters also had a lot of deprecated values and updates, which changed the storyline of the content. To fix those, we had to rewrite most of the chapters and revisit them repeatedly to ensure referenced content was not missing from other chapters. 

Key Takeaways 

Before agreeing to author a book, talk to other authors about the time and material, it takes for the type of book you are getting in. This will allow better planning of your work/life/book balance hence avoiding burnout. 

Once agreement is made, research the platform you will be responsible for authoring and training yourself—for example, Gitlab, DocBook, XML, etc. 

Take advice on how to plan or co-author the parts you’ll be responsible for. Record all agreements you made to keep track of the progress. Take everything very seriously and ensure it does not impact your other responsibilities. 

Be well organized in your time and planning. What times and which days you’ll be spending time on the book where? Create a cadence around this dedicated time, and it’s no different than finishing a degree. 

Allow extra time to deliver sections you’re involved in, as there’s a deep feedback circle. If you are authoring alone, this time will be reduced, but you’ll get feedback later in the process. If you are co-authoring, every chapter you’ve split will have to be reviewed before the first editorial. After the initial review, you’ll get feedback to clarify, modify, remove and rewrite multiple times. Some sections go into an endless feedback loop for a very long time. You’ll receive at least four to six technical people’s feedback later in the process and additional editorial feedback. So expect to return to a section or chapter you were involved in a year ago. 

Last but not least, do never over-commit yourself. This will decrease your productivity and lower the quality of the output. Timing is essential to fulfilling this lifelong dream of being an author. Some do it earlier in their career maybe a better result for authoring other books.  

I want to thank my wife, Aslihan, and my daughters, Ilayda and Lara, for their patience and support when I needed to focus and use family time to write this book.

Many thanks to my colleagues and team at PlanetScale, especially Deepthi Sigireddi, for her extra care and support. Special thanks go to the MySQL community, friends, and family members.

I also want to take a moment to thank Sveta Smirnova for her endless support while coaching me throughout my first book journey.

You can read the book here,

Thank you