It was not Tom Lane’s plan to become a computer person. Tom’s plan was to be a pinball machine designer. And yet for the last 26 years Tom has been one of the most prolific engineering contributors to Postgres. In this episode of Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano, PostgreSQL luminary Tom Lane walks us through how he got his start as a developer and in Postgres—including his time working on desktop calculators at HP. And how he has code running on Mars (and most of us don’t.) During Tom’s PhD studies at Carnegie Mellon, nobody told him databases were so interesting! It wasn’t until Tom needed a database to store stock trading information that he first got to work with Postgres. And that’s when Tom’s 26-year-long (and counting) Postgres story began.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Wikipedia: Tom Lane (computer scientist)
• Wikipedia: HP 9800 series
• CMU CS Department Coke Machine history
• Wikipedia: Honeywell 316
• Wikipedia: Teletype Model 33
• Wikipedia: Hydra (operating system)
• Wikipedia: William Wulf
• Wikipedia: Jon Bentley (computer scientist)
• Wikipedia: Mary Shaw (computer scientist)
• Wikipedia: Usenet
• GitHub: postgres commit by tglsfdc
• Article: The Mars 2020 Engineering Cameras and Microphone on the Perseverance Rover: A Next-Generation Imaging System for Mars Exploration by J.N. Maki et al.
• Blog: Open Source on Mars: Community powers NASA’s Ingenuity Helicopter by Klint Finley
• PostgreSQL Mailing List message: pg_upgrade --check fails to warn about abstime
• PostgreSQL: Core Team
• postgresql.git: commitdiff
• Blog: Proton to Fastmail by Tristan Partin
• Talking Postgres Ep18: How I got started as a dev (& in Postgres) with David Rowley
• PGConf EU 2024: Conference Schedule
• PGConf NYC 2024: Conference Schedule
• Talking Postgres Ep19: Becoming a Postgres committer with Melanie Plageman
• PostgreSQL: Commitfests
• Wikipedia: Cutting room floor
• PostgreSQL Mailing List message: Straight-from-the-horses-mouth dept
• PostgreSQL Mailing List message: [PATCH] Extend ALTER OPERATOR to support adding commutator, negator, hashes, and merges