Kaj is a software industry generalist, starting out as a programmer in the 1970s and 1980s, and moving on to management in the 1990s, as the CEO and founder of a startup in his native Finland (where, incidentally a gig took him to South Africa in the early 1990s). After the acquisition of his startup by MySQL AB, Kaj served in various VP roles in Engineering and Community Relations at MySQL AB, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and MariaDB Corporation, prior to joining MariaDB Foundation as CEO in February 2019. He has lived for nearly 20 years in Munich, Germany.
Programming-wise, Kaj started out on the TI-58 in the 1970s, followed by Basic and a bit of assembler on the ABC-80 and ABC-800, together with Michael “Monty” Widenius. Kaj took fondness to APL on mainframes, before settling on the 4GL Focus as the technical basis for his first company Polycon. After a Visual Basic period, a Delphi period and a brief PHP period, Kaj moved out of programming into management, only to realise in 2011 that Python is good for his mental well-being. His venture into geodata with Python even left some superficial traces on Github.
Accepted Talks:
Python & MariaDB: A Match?
Preamble: A happy rant by a Python developer about the feeling of coming back home to programming after decades in management, and seeing 90 % of all pain points of programming being solved. How Python contributes to the mental sanity of an incurable geek.
Main content: When is MariaDB Server the right choice for persistence of data in Python? Or, to split it:
- why is picking a database sexy, to begin with?
- why a relational database, not NoSQL?
- why an open source relational database?
- why MariaDB, not MySQL or Postgres?
- when not to pick MariaDB?
What MariaDB Server to pick?
- which Server version
- on cloud or on-prem
- which Python connector
- how often to upgrade
- what other related software to pick
