Meet the Percona Community team

We’ve just landed on X and Mastodon, and before the first real post goes out, we wanted to do something we don’t do often enough: introduce ourselves.

If you’ve been to Percona Live, a Percona.connect, a PGConf, KubeCon, FOSDEM, or pretty much any open source database event in the past few years, you’ve probably already met one of us. We’re the people behind the booth, on stage, organising the speakers, herding the giant Jenga set, or trying to convince you to play a quick game of chess between sessions. Now we’re also the people behind @PerconaCommunity on X and our new Mastodon account on the fediverse.

Each of us will sign our posts with our initials, so you’ll always know who you’re talking to. Here’s who we are.

Laura Czajkowski - Director of Community (LC)

Laura runs the team. She’s been in open source community work since the early 2000s, starting at the University of Limerick’s Skynet computer society and going on to lead community at Canonical (Ubuntu), MongoDB, Couchbase, Vonage, Solace, and Dragonfly before joining Percona. Former Ubuntu LoCo Council and Community Council member. Outside work she’s a Munster and Ireland rugby fan, runs a book club, plays tennis, and books regular trips to Disney World. Find her at laura.community.

Alastair Turner - Postgres Community Advocate (AT)

Alastair has been working with databases since 1995, settling on Postgres around 2002. If you’ve spoken to anyone at Percona about PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, Transparent Data Encryption, or extensions, there’s a good chance it was him. He writes regularly on the Percona Community blog and speaks at PGConf events across Europe and North America. He’s particularly interested in how open source communities work together - and what they can learn from each other.

Daniil Bazhenov - Senior Community Manager (DB)

Daniil organises our conference speakers, runs the Percona Forums, and has been a long-time contributor to the Percona Community blog. If you’ve ever submitted a talk to Percona Live or asked a question on forums.percona.com, you’ve crossed paths with him. He writes hands-on technical content too - GitOps with ArgoCD, PMM monitoring, Percona Everest from source - and hosts the Russian-language Percona Podcast.

Kyle Flanagan - Global Manager, Events (KF)

Kyle is the reason any of our events actually happen. He runs Percona’s global events programme, from Percona Live and Percona.connect to our presence at Open Source Summit, KubeCon, and dozens of regional events each year. Before Percona, he ran executive events at Utah Valley University. If you’ve grabbed a sticker at one of our booths, Kyle probably packed the box it came in.

Edith Puclla - Technology Evangelist (EP)

Originally from Peru, now based in London, Edith is a CNCF Ambassador, Docker Captain, and Data on Kubernetes Ambassador. Her background is in DevOps and infrastructure - Kubernetes, GPUs, Linux, distributed systems - and she contributes to translating Kubernetes documentation into Spanish through SIG-Operators. She’s a regular speaker at FOSDEM, KubeCon, Cloud Native Rejekts, and Percona University events across Latin America.

Why we’re doing this

We spend a lot of our time at events because that’s where the most useful conversations happen - the ones over coffee, at the booth, in the hallway between talks. Being on social gives us a way to keep those conversations going when we’re not in the same room. Expect event updates, contributor shout-outs, things we’ve found useful, and the occasional opinion. If we’ve shared it, we’ve actually read it.

Photo below was taken at our recent team offsite in Antalya - five people who genuinely like working together, in case the smiles don’t give it away.

Find us:

• X: @PerconaBytes
• Mastodon: @PerconaBytes
• Forums: forums.percona.com
• Community blog: percona.community

Come say hi. If we’re at an event near you, the booth is open - and so is the giant Jenga. ∎