My Journey to Explaining Explain with Michael Christofides

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