I’ll be speaking at the upcoming OSDC conference in Auckland, New Zealand! It’s on October 21st-23rd and you should go here right now and register. I’m giving two talks at OSDC this year:

• MySQL in the cloud, As A Service (Monday 21st, 12:00pm)
  There is no one magic solution to having MySQL As A Service work well, it’s a lot of small moving parts and options that need to be set, monitored and configured. We may wish it was different, or look at other database technologies, but there is a lot of legacy code that talks to MySQL, with all it’s idiosyncrasies – and we need to be able to support this code. In this talk, we’ll cover many of the problem areas and what you can do to avoid them.
• The Agony and Ecstasy of Continuous Integration (Wednesday 23rd, 2:30pm)
  This a tale of the introduction of continuous integration testing into a well established development team. It covers both the highs and lows and discusses strategies to deal with both the positives and negatives and in turn improve your own software engineering practices.

In case you need to quickly justify to your boss why you should go to OSDC, the conference organisers have helpfully provided a page of hints on just that subject.