Writing a book (or preparing for MySQL Conference)

I already announced about coming to MySQL Conference, but I didn’t realize preparing for it will take that much time. Last year I had just regular session about Wikipedia’s scaling and did feel that it is somewhat difficult to squeeze that much information into less than one hour. This year I opted in for 3h session (with short break in the middle), and instead of few slides with buzzwords on them I worked on workbook-like material to talk and discuss about.
Presentations are always easy, I have to admit I’ve made quite a lot of my slides an hour before actual talks. Now I realized that writing a workbook ends up to be a book, and books are not written in single day… Full disclosure: I looked at last year’s presentation files and blog posts for preparation of the talk, but still, things have changed, both in technology and in numbers. We have far more visitors (ha, >30kreq/s instead of 12kreq/s!), more content, slightly more servers and less troubles :-)
Today I’ve delivered the paper for printing (dead tree handouts for session attendees!), but there are many ideas already what to append or to extend, so this will end up being perpetual process of improving. Let’s hope tutorial attendees will bring their laptops for updated digital handouts.
Of course, the good part is that the real work will be over after first day and I’ll be able to enjoy other sessions & social activities. If only I survive the staff party..