How I got started as a dev and in Postgres with Melanie Plageman & Thomas Munro

07/06/23 • 77 min

In this episode of Path To Citus Con*, Melanie Plageman, a PostgreSQL hacker working at Microsoft, and Thomas Munro, PostgreSQL developer and committer also at Microsoft talk with co-hosts Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia. They talk through all the different ways they got started as developers. Does making your first patch to Postgres get you hooked for a lifetime? Do you have to be a tinkerer to be a good software engineer? What is the “toothbrush test”—and how do you make your avocation be your vocation? We hear stories about dropping out of school or dropped out of career fields before they found their true passions in development and Postgres.

*[Update: July 2024] Path To Citus Con has been renamed to Talking Postgres. All of the past podcast episodes from Path To Citus Con—now called Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano—can be found here: https://talkingpostgres.com

Some of the links mentioned in the order they were said:

Parallelism in PostgreSQL 15: Thomas’ Citus Con talk
Additional IO Observability in Postgres with pg_stat_io: Melanie’s Citus Con talk
Visualizing PostgreSQL I/O Performance for Development: Melanie’s talk at PGCon 2023
Add pg_stat_io view, providing more detailed IO statistics, committed by Melanie Plageman in PG 16
Neil deGrasse Tyson’s podcast StarTalk
From Nand to Tetris by Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken
Sinclair ZX81
All Things Open conference
PostgreSQL BuildFarm
Queues in PostgreSQL: Thomas’ 2022 talk

Some of the links mentioned in the order they were said:

Parallelism in PostgreSQL 15: Thomas’ Citus Con talk
Additional IO Observability in Postgres with pg_stat_io: Melanie’s Citus Con talk
Visualizing PostgreSQL I/O Performance for Development: Melanie’s talk at PGCon 2023
Add pg_stat_io view, providing more detailed IO statistics, committed by Melanie Plageman in PG 16
Neil deGrasse Tyson’s podcast StarTalk
From Nand to Tetris by Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken
Sinclair ZX81
All Things Open conference
PostgreSQL BuildFarm
Queues in PostgreSQL: Thomas’ 2022 talk

Previous Episode

Why give talks at Postgres conferences with Álvaro Herrera & Boriss Mejías

Álvaro Herrera, and Boriss Mejías, both longtime members of the Postgres developer community, explore the value of giving conference talks—as well as the work involved, the time it takes, and the many different types of conference talks, including presentations about about failure and things that have gone wrong.

In this episode of Path To Citus Con*, Claire and Pino guide the conversation on questions like: Should you add humor to your talks? How does your personality—introvert or extrovert—affect your conference presentations? Is it OK to give the same conference talk at different events?

Some of the links mentioned in the order they appeared:

Postgres Storytelling: Support in the Darkest Hour: Boriss’ Citus Con talk
A Curious Moon book by Rob Conery
Tomas Vondra's talks on YouTube
pgDay Paris 2022
FOSDEM PostgreSQL devroom
FOSDEM PGDAY 2023
Nordic PGDay 2022
PGConf.EU 2022
LFMF: How a CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY led to a 6 hour downtime by Gunnar "Nick" Bluth

Next Episode

My favorite ways to learn more about PostgreSQL with Grant Fritchey & Ryan Booz

Everyone learns differently. Grant Fritchey and Ryan Booz, database advocates at Redgate focusing on PostgreSQL, talk with Path To Citus Con* co-hosts Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia to explore the learning resources available to developers and users in all the corners of the PostgreSQL world. What drives you to learn: need or curiosity? What can podcasts teach us while we bike to work? Are conference talks good for growing skills, or are they better for networking? What about books? And do older books still have much to offer? It turns out, most people need much more than one approach to build their knowledge.

Some of the (many) links shared in the order they were mentioned: