
My Journey to Explaining Explain with Michael Christofides
05/03/24 • 85 min
Did you know that sometimes the fastest way of doing something is not having to do it at all? In this episode of Path To Citus Con*, the podcast for developers who love Postgres, Michael Christofides joins Claire Giordano to chat about his journey to explaining explain (or should we say EXPLAIN!?) Michael shared his origin story as a mathematician and his first experience with Postgres before walking us through co-founding a Postgres company and now co-hosting a podcast. Like many in the Postgres community, he is opinionated in the best way possible! We even learned about his passion for BUFFERS and why he believes everyone should use them. This session also dives into Michael’s belief in the importance of Postgres documentation. Because great documentation can be worth its weight in Gold, especially when the going gets tough.
*[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:
- Schedule for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2024
- Michael Christofides' company, pgMustard
- Blog: Where our name came from by Michael Christofides
- Wiki: Using EXPLAIN
- X: Nikolay Samokhvalov
- Video: Lightning Talks at pgDay Paris 2024
- Blog: What’s new with Postgres at Microsoft (August 2023) by Claire Giordano
- Blog: Faster PostgreSQL Counting by Joe Nelson
- GitHub: pg_docs_bot (browser extension)
- GitHub Docs: About GitHub Copilot Chat
- Documentation: Using EXPLAIN
- Glossary: EXPLAIN Glossary by Michael Christofides
- Video: EXPLAIN Explained by Josh Berkus
- Blog: Reading a Postgres EXPLAIN ANALYZE Query Plan by Caleb Hearth
- Blog: Explaining the unexplainable by Depesz
- PostgreSQL execution plan visualizer, explain.dalibo.com
- Blog: Planet PostgreSQL
- News: Postgres Weekly
- Playlist: 5mins of Postgres
- Podcast: Postgres FM podcast
- Cal invite for next Ep16 of Path To Citus Con podcast with Aaron Wislang & Teresa Giacomini
Did you know that sometimes the fastest way of doing something is not having to do it at all? In this episode of Path To Citus Con*, the podcast for developers who love Postgres, Michael Christofides joins Claire Giordano to chat about his journey to explaining explain (or should we say EXPLAIN!?) Michael shared his origin story as a mathematician and his first experience with Postgres before walking us through co-founding a Postgres company and now co-hosting a podcast. Like many in the Postgres community, he is opinionated in the best way possible! We even learned about his passion for BUFFERS and why he believes everyone should use them. This session also dives into Michael’s belief in the importance of Postgres documentation. Because great documentation can be worth its weight in Gold, especially when the going gets tough.
*[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:
- Schedule for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2024
- Michael Christofides' company, pgMustard
- Blog: Where our name came from by Michael Christofides
- Wiki: Using EXPLAIN
- X: Nikolay Samokhvalov
- Video: Lightning Talks at pgDay Paris 2024
- Blog: What’s new with Postgres at Microsoft (August 2023) by Claire Giordano
- Blog: Faster PostgreSQL Counting by Joe Nelson
- GitHub: pg_docs_bot (browser extension)
- GitHub Docs: About GitHub Copilot Chat
- Documentation: Using EXPLAIN
- Glossary: EXPLAIN Glossary by Michael Christofides
- Video: EXPLAIN Explained by Josh Berkus
- Blog: Reading a Postgres EXPLAIN ANALYZE Query Plan by Caleb Hearth
- Blog: Explaining the unexplainable by Depesz
- PostgreSQL execution plan visualizer, explain.dalibo.com
- Blog: Planet PostgreSQL
- News: Postgres Weekly
- Playlist: 5mins of Postgres
- Podcast: Postgres FM podcast
- Cal invite for next Ep16 of Path To Citus Con podcast with Aaron Wislang & Teresa Giacomini
Previous Episode

Becoming expert at using PostgreSQL with Chris Ellis
You have to find what works for you and Chris Ellis has never been the kind of person that could go and sit in a library—for Chris, the most productive Postgres place is in a coffee shop. In this episode of the Path To Citus Con* podcast for developers who love Postgres, Chris Ellis joined Claire and Pino to chat about his path to becoming more (and more) expert at using PostgreSQL. Curiosity may have killed the cat but it’s taken Chris places, beginning as a 5 year old playing with QBASIC. Chris shared his journey to becoming a developer, an electronic engineer, a builder, and a PostgreSQL user. This session also delves into Chris’s work as a Postgres conference speaker (and organizer!) Importantly, we spent time remembering Simon Riggs, Postgres leader extraordinaire. RIP.
*[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:
- Chris's first thread on the PostgreSQL mailing lists
- Slides: IoT with PostgreSQL—by Chris Ellis at PGConf.EU 2023
- Slides: Advantage PostgreSQL—by Chris Ellis at Nordic PGDay 2024
- Video: Should I use JSON in PostgreSQL?—by Boriss Mejías at PGConf.EU 2023
- Slides: Fighting the Butterflies & giving your first Postgres conference talk—by Claire Giordano at pgDay Paris 2024
- Markus Winand's website, Modern SQL
- Wikipedia: Linus’s law
- Andres Freund’s xz backdoor discovery
- Andres Freund’s Mastodon Toot about xz backdoor
- Podcast: Path to Citus Con Ep08: How I got started as a developer (& in Postgres) with Andres Freund & Heikki Linnakangas
- Podcast: Path To Citus Con Ep11: My Journey into Performance Benchmarking with Jelte Fennema-Nio & Marco Slot
- Podcast: Oxide and Friends next episode on Mon Apr 08 2024, featuring Andres Freund from Microsoft
- Jessie Frazelle tweet on LLM
- Video of pgDay Paris 2024 lightning talks, including Chris's "Electric Elephants" talk
- Post about Simon Riggs's tragic passing last week. He will be missed, he is missed, and many are heartbroken
- Simon Riggs: The Next 20 Years—keynote at PGConf.EU 2023
- Book: The Art of PostgreSQL by Dimitri Fontaine
- Podcast: Path To Citus Con Ep09: Solving every data problem in SQL w/Dimitri Fontaine & Vik Fearing
- Blog: Planet PostgreSQL
- Blog: Contributing to Postgres 101: A Beginner's Experience by Elizabeth Christensen
- Book: Linux Kernel Development by Robert Love
- Chris Ellis’s LED PCB Art
- Blog: pgDay ...
Next Episode

The Making of POSETTE: An Event for Postgres with Teresa Giacomini & Aaron Wislang
It’s not a conference unless you can confer, right? POSETTE organizers Teresa Giacomini and Aaron Wislang join Claire Giordano on the Path To Citus Con* podcast to share backstage perspectives on the making of POSETTE: An Event for Postgres. How do you feel about captions: love or hate? Should livestream talks be pre-recorded or presented live? Why rename from Citus Con to POSETTE? Where did the inspiration for POSETTE come from? And can the hallway track at a conference actually be fun—if it is virtual? Also discussed: Avett Brothers lyrics, the surprising number of POSETTE speakers with chickens, and the existential question of whether the work in organizing a conference is worth it.
*[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:
- Blog post: What’s in a name? About the naming of POSETTE: An Event for Postgres
- FOSDEM: the conference whose name inspired the POSETTE name
- Playlist of all 42 talks from POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2024
- Playlist of the 4 unique livestreams from POSETTE 2024
- CFP is open: PGDay Lowlands 2024 Call for Papers will close July 9, 2024
- Virtual conference that POSETTE organizers were inspired by: P99 Conf
- Discord: Microsoft Open Source Discord, Home for virtual hallway track for #posetteconf
- Adam Wølk’s speaker page for POSETTE
- Speaker interview with Polina Bungina at POSETTE
- Blog post: About Talk Selection for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2024, by Claire Giordano
- Blog post: Building the PGConf.dev Programme, by Paul Ramsey
- pgDay Paris 2024 note about talk selection process
- Keynote: All The Postgres Things at Microsoft, POSETTE edition, by Charles Feddersen
- Keynote: The Open Source Geospatial Community, PostGIS, & Postgres, by Regina Obe
- Keynote: Why I love open source development & what I learned from K8s, by Sarah Novotny
- Keynote: A Walking Tour of PostgreSQL, by Thomas Munro
- Lyrics from The Perfect Space by The Avett Brothers
- Video: Lessons Learned benchmarking & profiling distributed PostgreSQL, by Lotte Felius
- Video: Postgres Storytelling: Support in the Darkest Hour | Citus Con 2023, by Boriss Mejías
- Video: Postgres Storytelling: What's going on with Synchronous Replication?, by Boriss Mejías
- Video: Vindicating ZFS with PostgreSQL: Unleashing the Power of Scalability, includes a bit of jazz music by Federico Campoli
- Blog post: Ultimate Guide to POSETTE: An Event for Postgres, 2024 edition
- Social post: Tweet by Kelsey Hightower with advice to conference organizers
- Video from PGConfEU 2023: So you want a PGDay in your city, by Henrietta Dombrovskaya & Teresa Giacomini
- Blog post:
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