How I got started as a developer (& in Postgres) with Andres Freund & Heikki Linnakangas
10/13/23 • 73 min
Lots of stories of how folks got started as developers! Andres Freund and Heikki Linnakangas join Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia to explore more paths for getting into Postgres on Path To Citus Con*, the podcast for developers who love Postgres. How do you do development: with a cup of coffee, with music in the background, maybe at 3am? How do you approach mentoring other developers? Why did you stick with Postgres and make it a career? Lots of lively discussion about building not only code, but relationships in the community, in the open. Also, stories about Heikki’s and Andres’s first Postgres patch submissions, and working via the hackers mailing list. Finally, what advice would you give to your younger self starting in the development world?
*[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
Links mentioned in this episode, in the order they were covered:
- Neon: https://neon.tech/
- Rob Conery and Scott Hanselman's book: The Imposter's Handbook (https://twitter.com/shanselman/status/1610805353255677953)
- Path To Citus Con Ep04: https://talkingpostgres.com/episodes/how-i-got-started-as-a-developer-in-postgres
- Andres’ first patch to Postgres: https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit;h=c43feefa806c81d68115ed03a7f723720cefad31
- PGConf NYC 2023: https://2023.pgconf.nyc/
- Flow book: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Flow/QVjPsd1UukEC
- Archives of Postgres hackers mailing list: https://www.postgresql.org/list/pgsql-hackers/
- List of Postgres Contributors: https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/
- Description of Postgres Core Team: https://www.postgresql.org/developer/core/
- Postgres Weekly newsletter: https://postgresweekly.com/
Lots of stories of how folks got started as developers! Andres Freund and Heikki Linnakangas join Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia to explore more paths for getting into Postgres on Path To Citus Con*, the podcast for developers who love Postgres. How do you do development: with a cup of coffee, with music in the background, maybe at 3am? How do you approach mentoring other developers? Why did you stick with Postgres and make it a career? Lots of lively discussion about building not only code, but relationships in the community, in the open. Also, stories about Heikki’s and Andres’s first Postgres patch submissions, and working via the hackers mailing list. Finally, what advice would you give to your younger self starting in the development world?
*[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
Links mentioned in this episode, in the order they were covered:
- Neon: https://neon.tech/
- Rob Conery and Scott Hanselman's book: The Imposter's Handbook (https://twitter.com/shanselman/status/1610805353255677953)
- Path To Citus Con Ep04: https://talkingpostgres.com/episodes/how-i-got-started-as-a-developer-in-postgres
- Andres’ first patch to Postgres: https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit;h=c43feefa806c81d68115ed03a7f723720cefad31
- PGConf NYC 2023: https://2023.pgconf.nyc/
- Flow book: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Flow/QVjPsd1UukEC
- Archives of Postgres hackers mailing list: https://www.postgresql.org/list/pgsql-hackers/
- List of Postgres Contributors: https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/
- Description of Postgres Core Team: https://www.postgresql.org/developer/core/
- Postgres Weekly newsletter: https://postgresweekly.com/
Previous Episode
Why people care about PostGIS and Postgres with Paul Ramsey & Regina Obe
The geospatial world of Postgres is so much more than mapping. Paul Ramsey and Regina Obe join Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia to explore the "where" on Path To Citus Con*, the podcast for developers who love Postgres. What are some of the unexpected use cases for PostGIS, one of the most popular extensions to Postgres? How have Large Language Models helped in the geospatial world? Can you really model almost anything with pgRouting? “Where” is the universal foreign key. They talk about communities and governments using geospatial data and how it's very difficult to build a database that does not have some sort of spatial component to it. Why do people care about PostGIS? Find out more about OpenStreetMap and its place in the open source geospatial world. Finally, Paul and Regina share the origin story for the PostGIS extension to 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
Links mentioned in this episode, in the order they were covered:
- PostGIS: https://postgis.net/
- FOSS4G NA: https://foss4gna.org/
- Ushahidi: https://www.ushahidi.com/
- Humanitarian Open Street Map: https://www.hotosm.org/
- OpenStreetMap: https://www.openstreetmap.org/
- pgRouting: https://pgrouting.org/
- Regina Obe’s books: https://locatepress.com/book/pgr
- Regina’s book “PostGIS In Action”: https://www.manning.com/books/postgis-in-action-third-edition?experiment=B
- MobilityDB: https://github.com/MobilityDB/MobilityDB
- Blog: Analyzing GPS trajectories at scale with Postgres, PostGIS, MobilityDB, & Citus: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-database-for-postgresql/analyzing-gps-trajectories-at-scale-with-postgres-mobilitydb-amp/ba-p/1859278
- OSGeo: https://www.osgeo.org/
- Simon Willison’s presentation on "The weird world of LLMs": https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/3/weird-world-of-llms/
- QGIS: https://qgis.org/en/site/
- QGIS “Gentle Introduction” documentation: https://docs.qgis.org/3.28/en/docs/gentle_gis_introduction/
- PostGIS Workshops: https://postgis.net/documentation/training/#workshop
- Locate Press: https://locatepress.com/
- FedGeoDay 2023: https://www.fedgeo.us/about-2023
- Schedule of FOSS4G NA 2023: https://foss4gna.org/schedule.html#schedule
- FOSS4G Brazil, December 2024: https://www.osgeo.org/foundation-news/foss4g-2024-has-been-awarded-to-belem-brazil/
- Paul's keynote talk at PGConfEU in Lisbon in 2018, titled "Put some "where" in your WHERE clause": https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1xyXA4-0wmNX7WfiLeH9h10bIkZxrej278-mMaClagys/edit?usp=sharing
Next Episode
Solving every data problem in SQL w/Dimitri Fontaine & Vik Fearing
Is being lazy a good reason to learn SQL? Dimitri Fontaine and Vik Fearing join Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia on the Path To Citus Con* podcast for developers who love Postgres—to discuss whether every data problem can be (or should be) solved in SQL. Have you tried to solve all the Advent of Code puzzles with SQL? Or written a book for application developers about The Art of PostgreSQL? Or tried to solve a murder mystery by running SQL queries? Regardless of whether you pronounce SQL as “sequel” or as “ess-cue-ell”, getting skilled at SQL is like going to the gym for exercise. It’s ideal to do it every day to build up your strength. Also, this episode includes an explanation of what a “declarative” language like SQL is—plus a fun segue into time zones.
*[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
Links mentioned in this episode, in the order they were covered:
- Dimitri Fontaine’s blog: https://tapoueh.org/
- Advent of Code: https://adventofcode.com/
- Dimitri’s book, The Art of PostgreSQL: https://theartofpostgresql.com/
- Blog post about What’s new in SQL:2023: https://peter.eisentraut.org/blog/2023/04/04/sql-2023-is-finished-here-is-whats-new
- PostgreSQL Exercises at pgexercises.com: https://pgexercises.com/
- SQL Murder Mystery for learning SQL: https://mystery.knightlab.com/
- Pgvector extension for Postgres and AI embeddings: https://github.com/pgvector/pgvector
- Vik’s Advent of Code puzzle solutions in SQL on GitHub: https://github.com/xocolatl/advent-of-code
- Stack Overflow data in Postgres, from pgtreats GitHub repo: https://github.com/pgtreats/stackoverflow_in_pg
- OpenStreetMap runs on Postgres: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=4/38.01/-95.84
- Uber data set: https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/uber-tlc-foil-response
- Ideas for fun, open data sets: https://data.world/data-society?entryTypeLabel=dataset&tab=resources
- “Don’t Do This” Timestamp learnings on PostgreSQL wiki: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Don't_Do_This#Don.27t_use_timestamp_.28without_time_zone.29
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