Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano

When I found out that Django developer and Python Software Foundation chair Dawn Wages has a chapter in her upcoming Domain-Driven Django book called “Just Use Postgres”, I knew we had to get her on the show. In this episode of Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano, Dawn breaks down why so many Python and Django developers have such an affinity for Postgres. And we dive into the Djangonaut Space mentoring program (where contributors launch), learn why “free as in puppies” beats “free as in cake” for open source vibes, and dig into why Python is the second-best language for everything.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Project page: psycopg
• Documentation: Psycopg 3 – PostgreSQL database adapter for Python
• Project page: PostgreSQL open source project
• Git repo: code for PostgreSQL.org website
• Conference: PyCon US 2025, happening May 14-22 in Pittsburgh
• Conference: PGConf.dev 2025 Schedule, happening May 13-16 in Montreal Canada
• Conference: Prague PostgreSQL Developer Day 2025 (P2D2) Schedule, which took place Jan 28-29
• Wikipedia page: Model-view-controller software design pattern
• Book: Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0, affectionately called “the four heads book”
• Podcast episode: Working in Public with Simon Willison & Marco Slot
• Blog: Simon Willison’s TILs, aka Things I’ve learned
• Simon Willison’s Weblog: Here’s how I use LLMs to help me write code
• Simon Willison’s Weblog: How I make annotated presentations
• Survey: Python Developers Survey 2023 Results
• Python Docs: What’s new in Python 3.14
• Mentorship program: Djangonaut Space
• Mentorship program: Media & Talks about Djangonaut Space
• Podcast episode: Why mentor Postgres developers with Robert Haas
• Slides: PGConf EU 2024 talk by Claire Giordano about Contributions to Postgres, including maps showing how global the Postgres project is
• Video of POSETTE 2024 talk by Paolo Melchiorre: Semantic search with Django, PostgreSQL, & pgvector
• Video of Citus Con 2023 talk: Maps with Django (and PostGIS), by Paolo Melchiorre
• Video of Citus Con 2022 talk: Django with PostgreSQL superpowers, by Paolo Melchiorre
• Conference: DjangoCon Africa 2025, happening August 11-15 in Tanzania 

Nobody works on an open-source project forever—eventually, people move on. So of course today's Postgres contributors want to see more developers join the project, pick up the torch, and continue to make Postgres amazing. Hence the importance of mentorship. In this episode of Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano, PostgreSQL major contributor and committer Robert Haas shares how he learned the ropes in Postgres by channeling “what would Tom Lane do” during patch reviews; why he launched the new PostgreSQL Hackers Mentoring program; and the intellectually stimulating care and feeding it takes to make Postgres thrive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Podcast episode: Becoming a Postgres committer with Melanie Plageman  
• Slide: PGConf EU 2024 talk by Claire Giordano about Contributions to Postgres, including new mentoring program
• Blog post: New Mentoring Program for Code Contributors in Postgres, by Robert Haas
• Blog post: Postgres Mentoring Program Updates, by Robert Haas 
• Discord invite for PostgreSQL Hacker Mentoring server: https://discord.gg/bx2G9KWyrY
• Bio: Margo Seltzer, the PGConf.dev 2024 keynote speaker
• Video: PGConf.dev 2024 panel discussion about Making PostgreSQL Hacking More Inclusive with Amit Langote, Masahiko Sawada, Melanie Plageman, & Robert Haas
• Mailing list: PostgreSQL Hackers
• Upcoming Conference: PGConf.dev 2025, the annual PostgreSQL Development Conference happening in Montreal Canada on May 13-16, 2025
• Blog: Postgres committer Tomas Vondra’s Blog - Look for [PATCH IDEA] 
• Video of Talk: CMUDB Database talk about PostgreSQL Optimizer Methodology, by Robert Haas
• Podcast episode: How I got started as a developer & in Postgres with David Rowley
• Calendar invite: LIVE recording of Ep25 of Talking Postgres podcast to happen on Wed Mar 12, 2025 with guest Dawn Wages of the Python developer community

March 5th 2005 at 3 PM in Copenhagen. That’s the exact time and place Daniel Gustafsson’s career took an unexpected turn, pivoting from operating systems to databases. At LinuxForum that day, Daniel had planned to meet up with the FreeBSD community, but a chance session about Postgres by Bruce Momjian completely blew his mind. By the time Daniel was on the train back to Malmö, he was already compiling Postgres. In this episode of Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano, Postgres major contributor and committer Daniel Gustafsson of Microsoft walks us through how he got his start as a developer and in Postgres—starting with his earliest computing memories of a hulking steel box in his family’s living room in Sweden. Also part of Daniel’s story: guitar tuning software. And curl!

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Wikipedia: ABC 80
• Wikipedia: mSQL
• Wikipedia: PCBoard BBS (bulletin board system) application
• Conference back in 2010: CHAR(10) – Clustering, HA and Replication Conference
• Wikipedia: IRIX operating system
• Internet Archive Wayback Machine link: LinuxForum Conference Agenda from March 5, 2005 with Bruce Momjian’s 3:00pm talk about Postgres 
• Podcast: Solving every data problem in SQL with Dimitri Fontaine & Vik Fearing
• Conference: Nordic PGDay 2025 to happen Mar 18th in Copenhagen
• Conference: All Things Open 2025 to happen Oct 12-14 in Raleigh NC
• Conference: PGConf.dev 2025 to happen May 13-16 in Montreal, Canada
• CFP: POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2025 CFP open until Feb 9 2025 (it’s a virtual event)
• Slides from PGConfEU 2024 Talk: What’s in a Postgres major release? An analysis of contributions in v17 timeframe
• Video of PGConf EU 2024 Talk: Analysis of contributions in the v17 timeframe, by Claire Giordano
• Book recommendation: The Dragon Book, a.k.a. Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools
• Book recommendation: The Purple Book (or, Wizard Book), a.k.a. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP)
• Book recommendation: The Practice of Programming by Kernighan & Pike
• Calendar invite: LIVE recording of Ep24 of Talking Postgres podcast to happen on Wed Feb 05, 2025 with guest Robert Haas

What’s it like to lead Postgres engineering at a cloud giant like Microsoft Azure? In this episode of Talking Postgres, host Claire Giordano chats with Affan Dar, VP of Engineering for Postgres at Microsoft. Affan’s team is behind the Azure Database for PostgreSQL managed service and also contributes extensively to the upstream Postgres open-source project. Affan walks us through his career journey—from his first job as an embedded systems engineer, to navigating the shift between engineering and management, to leading one of the largest Postgres engineering teams in the world. He shares the strategy behind Microsoft’s investments into Postgres, explores how massive cloud fleets are influencing the future of Postgres, and shares what keeps him up at night.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Docs: Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server
• GitHub repo for Durable Task Framework, the first open source project Affan worked on
• GitHub repo for pgvector open source extension to Postgres
• Docs: Elastic cluster feature in Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server, based on Citus
• GitHub repo for Citus open source
• Blog post: Postgres horizontal scaling with elastic clusters on Azure Database for PostgreSQL, by Adam Wølk
• GitHub repo for DiskANN open source
• Docs: How to enable and use the DiskANN index for Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server
• Blog post: Think of language models like ChatGPT as a “calculator for words” by Simon Willison
• Blog post: What’s new with Postgres at Microsoft (updated 2x/year typically)
• Video of Talk at Microsoft Ignite: Improving accuracy of GenAI apps with Azure Database for PostgreSQL by Maxim Lukiyanov (Microsoft), Jay Yang (UBS), & Orhun Oezbek (UBS)
• CFP: POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2025 CFP open until Feb 9 2025
• Calendar invite: LIVE recording of Ep23 of Talking Postgres podcast to happen on Wed Jan 15, 2025 with guest Daniel Gustafsson

Have you ever achieved something remarkable because someone planted an idea in your mind? In this episode of Talking Postgres, host Claire Giordano talks with Andrew Atkinson—a Rails developer and Postgres user whose journey to becoming a published author began with a simple seed of inspiration. Andrew’s story started with an internal presentation on how to tackle tricky scalability challenges in Rails, grew into a Postgres conference talk at PGConf NYC—and ultimately evolved into his book, High Performance PostgreSQL for Rails. Also in this episode: what does cheese have to do with Postgres? Is writing a good way to think? What’s the connection between Postgres and swimming to Antarctica? And which chapter of his book does Andrew love the most?

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Book: High Performance PostgreSQL for Rails by Andrew Atkinson 
• E-book Discount: Use discount code TalkingPostgres to get 35% off discount of Andrew’s book
• Blog post: Readers get their copies of High Performance PostgreSQL for Rails by Andrew Atkinson
• Book: Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long Distance Swimmer by Lynne Cox
• Talk Abstract: PGConf NYC 2021 talk by Andrew Atkinson 
• Slides: PGConf NYC 2021 talk on How We Made PG Fitter, Happier, More Productive by Andrew Atkinson
• Video: POSETTE 2024 talk about SaaS on Rails on PostgreSQL by Andrew Atkinson  
• Ruby User Groups: List of upcoming Ruby user groups
• Blog post: Writing is Thinking, an annotated twitter thread by Steve Sinofsky 
• Talking Postgres podcast Ep19: Becoming a Postgres committer with Melanie Plageman 
• Talking Postgres podcast Ep20: How I got started as a developer (& in Postgres) with David Rowley
• CFP: Prague PostgreSQL Developer Day 2025 (P2D2) CFP open until Nov 23, 2024
• CFP: FOSDEM PGDay 2025 CFP open until Nov 29, 2024
• CFP: Nordic PGDay 2025 CFP open until Dec 31, 2024
• CFP: pgDay Paris 2025 CFP open until Dec 31, 2024 
• CFP: PGConf.dev 2025 CFP open until Jan 01, 2025
• CFP: POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2025 CFP open until Feb 09, 2025
• Calendar invite: LIVE recording of Ep22 of Talking Postgres podcast

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

If you could work on anything, would you quit your job to pursue it? Postgres committer and major contributor Melanie Plageman joined Claire Giordano on this episode of the Talking Postgres podcast (formerly Path To Citus Con) to share her story about becoming a Postgres committer. Melanie pivoted from IT consulting to open-source development, driven by her fascination with systems engineering and Postgres open source. What’s the secret to getting your patch committed? Feedback is a gift, but how willing are you to embrace it? How important is mentorship—and how important is it to ask for help? Even though crafting clear, concise emails to a technical community might not be easy, Melanie shows how empathy for other Postgres developers can help your work to stand out.

Links discussed in this episode

• Pgsql-hackers mailing list: Announcement about new Postgres committers
• Conference: PGConf.dev 2025
• Blog: Talk, then code by Dave Cheny
• Blog posts about mentoring by Robert Haas
• Blog: Mentoring Program Updates by Robert Haas
• X: Brendan Burn’s tweet about the Kubernetes Chop Wood and Carry Water award
• Award: Chop Wood Carry Water
• Blog: Who Contributed to PostgreSQL Development in 2023? by Robert Haas
• Abstract: What's in a Postgres major release? An analysis of contributions in the v17 timeframe for PGConfEU 2024 by Claire Giordano
• Talking Postgres Ep18: How I got started as a developer (& in Postgres) with David Rowley
• Wikipedia: PostgreSQL Contributor Gifts
• Cal invite for next Ep 20 of Talking Postgres with Tom Lane to be recorded LIVE on Wed Oct 9, 2024

Podcasts & conference videos that Melanie listens to when running that she recommends to Postgres developers:

• Podcast: Oxide and Friends
• Podcast: postgres.fm
• Podcast: Software Engineering Radio
• Podcast: Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano
• Podcast: Two’s Complement
• SE Radio: Ep 432: Brian D Foy on Perl 7
• Video: Memory & Caches by Matt Godbolt
• Videos: POSETTE 2024 playlist
• Video: RailsConf 2014 - All the Little Things by Sandi Metz
• YouTube: Brandon Foltz
• YouTube: CMU Database Group
• YouTube: Kernel Recipes
• YouTube: Linux Plumbers Conference
• YouTube: Matt Godbolt
• YouTube: Onur Mutlu Lectures
• YouTube: pganalyze
• YouTube: PostgreSQL Development Conference
• YouTube: SNIAVideo
• YouTube: Strange Loop Conference
• YouTube: The Linux Foundation

Ever wonder how driving a forklift at a cheese factory could lead to a career in databases? Postgres committer David Rowley joined Claire Giordano on this episode of the Talking Postgres podcast (formerly Path To Citus Con) to share his story about how he got started as a developer and in Postgres. Could an unexpected job lead to your dream career? Does speeding things up give you a buzz? How could an idea from a hike become a Postgres patch? And what is the importance of doing the research before you submit a proposal to the Postgres mailing list? Also discussed: resources available to start your Postgres journey such as books, blogs, videos, and the pgsql-hackers mailing list.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Wikipedia: Acorn Computers
• PostgreSQL Mailing List Archives: David’s first email: Possible problem with EXTRACT(EPOCH FROM TIMESTAMP)
• Google Usenet: Larry Page’s Java question from Jan 7, 1996
• Blog: Speeding up sort performance in Postgres 15 by David Rowley
• Blog: What’s new in the Postgres 16 query planner / optimizer by David Rowley
• Book: The Art of PostgreSQL by Dimitri Fontaine
• Book: The Art of SQL by Stéphane Faroult, Peter Robson
• Book: The Art of Writing Efficient Programs: An advanced programmer's guide to efficient hardware utilization and compiler optimizations using C++ examples by Fedor G. Pikus
• X: Simon Willison’s tweet
• Blog by Tony Finch
• Book: Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey
• GitHub Issue: Coughing in my microphone causes segfault
• PostgreSQL Mailing Lists: Overview
• PostgreSQL Mailing Lists: pgsql-general
• PostgreSQL Mailing Lists: pgsql-hackers
• Video: Making your patch more committable by Melanie Plageman at PGConf.EU 2023
• Cheese company: Seriously Cheddar
• Talking Postgres Ep04: How I got started as a dev and in Postgres with Melanie Plageman & Thomas Munro
• Talking Postgres Ep08: How I got started as a developer (& in Postgres) with Andres Freund & Heikki Linnakangas
• Cal invite for next Ep19 of Talking Postgres with Melanie Plageman
• Cal invite for next Ep 20 of Talking Postgres with Tom Lane

Have you ever eavesdropped on other people’s conversations? Former co-host Pino de Candia joins Claire Giordano on this episode of Talking Postgres (formerly Path To Citus Con) to share their experience on podcasting about Postgres. Is listening to a podcast the next best thing to being in the hallway track at a conference? Does it bring the community together? How beneficial has it been to have a parallel chat while recording live? What is the “sweet spot” for the number of guests to have per episode? Is structure important for a podcast? Also discussed: this podcast’s rename, a walk down memory lane reflecting on the past 16 episodes, and shout-outs to other podcasts about Postgres.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Cal invite for next Ep18 of Talking Postgres with David Rowley
• Podcast: Talking Postgres 
• Talking Postgres Ep01: Working in public on open source with Simon Willison & Marco Slot
• Ep02: How to get Postgres ready for the next 100 million users
• Ep03: Why giving talks at Postgres conferences matterswith Álvaro Herrera and Boriss Mejías
• Video: Postgres Storytelling: What’s going on with Synchronous Replication | POSETTE 2024 by Boriss Mejías
• Video: Postgres Storytelling: Support in the Darkest Hour | Citus Con 2023, by Boriss Mejías
• Ep04: How I got started as a dev and in Postgres with Melanie Plageman & Thomas Munro
• Ep05: My favorite ways to learn more about PostgreSQL with Grant Fritchey & Ryan Booz
• Video: Fibonacci Spirals and Ways to Contribute to Postgres—Beyond Code | Citus Con 2022, by Claire Giordano
• Ep06: You're probably already using Postgres with Chelsea Dole & Floor Drees
• Wikipedia: Object–relational mapping
• Video: How to work with other people | POSETTE 2024, by Floor Drees and Jimmy Angelakos
• Ep07: Why people care about PostGIS and Postgres with Paul Ramsey & Regina Obe
• Ep08: How I got started as a developer (& in Postgres) with Andres Freund & Heikki Linnakangas
• Satya Nadella’s LinkedIn post about Andres Freund’s xz backdoor discovery
• Ep09: Solving every data problem in SQL with Dimitri Fontaine & Vik Fearing
• Wikipedia: Advent of Code
• Ep10: My Journey into Postgres Monitoring with Lukas Fittl & Rob Treat
• Ep11: My Journey into Performance Benchmarking with Jelte Fennema-Nio & Marco Slot
• Ep12: From developer to PostgreSQL specialist with Derk van Veen
• Ep13: Spinning up on Postgres & AI with Arda Aytekin
• Ep14: Becoming expert at using PostgreSQL with Chris Ellis
• Video: Electric Elephants | pgDay Paris 2024, by Chris Ellis
• Ep15: My Journey to Explaining Explain with Michael Christofides
• Podcast: Postgres FM
• Ep16: The Making of POSETTE: An Event for Postgres with Teresa Giacomini & Aaron Wislang
• Podcast: Scaling PostgreSQL
• Podcast: Postgres FM Ep99 with guest Claire Giordano: Sponsoring the community
• Podcast: Hacking Postgres
• Playlist: 5mins of Postgres

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: The Story Behind the Activity Book for Postgres, by Teresa Giacomini