Last Thursday I was invited to the panel organized by Ottawa Chapter of Canadian Women In Technology (CanWIT). I wanted to mention it here as CanWIT sets up very interesting events for women in IT so if you are interested in progressing your IT career, definitely consider their events.
The panel was designed to share the experience of few CIOs and CTOs — how they got into this job and how they developed their career, what the day of a CTO and CIO is like, what challenges they face in their jobs and how those challenges are approached. There were three panel speakers. Hana Pika is the CIO at University of Ottawa Heart Institute, established and rather traditionally-conservative organization when it comes to IT. Wayne MacLaurin is the CTO at Sedari, a startup providing domain registry services. Finally, myself with the official title of CTO but in reality having mixed responsibilities of CTO and CIO and Pythian not being a startup but still very nimble company. Read the rest of this entry . . .
In celebration of the company’s 14 year anniversary, Pythian today announced a donation of $30K worth of scholarships to support students in the MIS Program at the University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management.
The scholarship will support four Honours Bachelor of Commerce students specializing in Management Information Services (MIS) each year by providing them with a $2,500 scholarship and a paid internship.
Since opening its doors in 1997, Pythian has grown from an ambitious local startup into one of the world’s most respected database services companies. Founder Paul Vallée and team members Marc Fielding, Sylvain Fontaine, and Greg Leger are alumni of the MIS program. Read the rest of this entry . . .
In a recent session with University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management Paul Vallee, winner of the Ottawa Business Journal Forty Under 40 Award states “starting a business is a no-brainer” to a captive audience of student entrepreneurs.
Paul describes how he started Pythian, key traits you need to have to be an entreprenueur, and shares secrets to success.
Hi folks. I am back for the second in what will eventually be a long line of infrequent updates. Did you miss me?
End of School with Linux
OCLUG (The Ottawa Canada Linux Users Group) is putting on an event called—you guessed it—End of School with Linux. This is happening on April 28, 2009 starting at 11am at the University of Ottawa in the SITE building, room C0136. The purpose of the event is to help people with their Linux systems, install Linux, fix issues, and just generally help out in the community. Your humble blogger will be there, manning the booth from 1200-1600, so come on down. And tell a friend, too.
Ubuntu 9.04 was released today. I have not yet looked at any reviews of the release candidates, but I am on my way out to pick up some new hardware on which to install it tonight.
I’m back again with another in what I hope will be a long line of “Quick Tips for Newbies” series.
At The Pythian Group, we have employees all over the globe, from our headquarters in Ottawa to regional offices in Boston, Prague, India and Sydney, and a few scattered remote workers in Seattle, Paris, Kiev, Brazil, South Africa and Wisconsin, among other places. In other words, we are spread across multiple timezones, and since it wasn’t too long ago that everyone was in Ottawa, this is something that still presents little quirks.
One such quirk involved email generated by one of our internal Oracle instances—via a stored procedure that used UTL_SMTP to send the messages—did not have timezone information in the “Date” email header. As a result, they would be stamped with the hour in Eastern timezone (Ottawa time), but the mail clients would think that hour was local. Depending on where you are relative to Ottawa, this could be many hours in the past or future. Of course, this wouldn’t be noticed if you were in Ottawa or even Boston, both in Eastern. For the rest, it was at the very least, an annoyance—but one that is easily fixed.
Long story short — I’m moving to Australia. My flight from Ottawa leaves in three hours and I’m all packed and ready to go. Today we had a kiss-goodbye lunch at here at the Pythian office in Ottawa, and I was presented my new role Down Under. Hmm . . . to be honest, I expected it to be somewhat different:
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I was at the Hotsos Symposium 2008 this year. You might not know that I also had a chance to take few days off and spend 1+ week vacation in Texas after the symposium — enjoyed the sun and warm weather. My family liked that even more than I did.
Unfortunately, when I was back home last weekend, I discovered pretty unpleasant view from my windows (that’s not basement!):
The view is much better now — I can see some bits of blue sky above a snow bank. So it’s end of March and these days are sunny but freeing — feels like -20 degrees Celsius (below 0 Fahrenheit). My back still hurts from excessive snow shoveling last weekend (so that I can see blue sky from my windows). And… sorry nothing about Oracle — I’m too busy shoveling the snow away from my house so that when it melts next year — I won’t have flooding problem.
I know warmer places do exist! Maybe I should find one?
We have several MySQL DBA openings, one in each of our offices in Ottawa, Boston, or Hyderabad, India. (Our Sydney office is doin’ fine.)
Working at Pythian is different than working in-house or as a consultant, because you’ll be making your contributions available to each of the customers assigned to your team, allowing you to see more use cases, more technologies, and work with more and varied environments, all the while building interesting and long-lasting working relationships with your peers. I will gladly sponsor a work visa for the right candidate anywhere in the world.
We support some of the most interesting internet-scale MySQL environments in the world, including major environments for Fox Interactive Media, Videoegg.com, Electronic Arts, and Renkoo.com.
Top Criteria
Outstanding MySQL production administration and server tuning skills, bonus points for cluster, partitioning, and major implementation and upgrades experience
Exceptional troubleshooting, problem-solving and learning skills
Superior productivity per hour and overall getting-the-job-done-right abilities
Fluent communication skills in English, both written and oral, are mandatory. Second or third languages are also a plus (we have customers all over the world and are always eager to add a language to our repertoire)
Stored procedure, trigger, view and nonstandard storage engine experience a plus (such as SoliddDB, the Amazon S3 engine, Falcon, etc.)
Interest or experience in publications, blogging, and presentations a plus
Job Highlights
Work on an elite team of DBAs for an elite and growing group of customers; you’ll learn more here in a year than in any in-house DBA job no matter how long you stay; I personally guarantee it.
Work and gain valuable experience on every mainstream platform, including AIX, HP/UX, Solaris, Linux, Tru64, Windows, etc. We many not run MySQL on all of those platforms, but we certainly run enterprise infrastructure on one team or another on each of those and more. If you’re interested in technology, there a lot of it in use here and that makes it a great place to be.
Learn and support every mainstream technology and feature, including cluster, advanced replication, GIS, etc. etc.
Work across multiple industries including health care, manufacturing, media, dot-com, education, retail, services, and many more.
Work in a company that values hard work, not long work.
Work in a company that allows you to research and write articles, presentations and blog posts on company time, and pays for you to present your research at just about any user conference worldwide.
There is also the obvious opportunity to learn Oracle and SQL Server, if you don’t already know those platforms. We here at Pythian are about the data, first and foremost. So keep your platform advocacy for the conferences, mmmkay? We love ‘em all ’round these parts.
Consult for high-profile customers all around the world without leaving the office. This is really the most awesome part; almost any other job on the planet that remotely lets you see this much tech has you traveling like mad. Not us.
Last Thursday I was invited to the panel organized by Ottawa Chapter of Canadian Women In Technology (CanWIT). I wanted to mention it here as CanWIT sets up very interesting events for women in IT so if you are interested in progressing your IT career, definitely consider their events.
