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