Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano

Everyone learns differently. Grant Fritchey and Ryan Booz, database advocates at Redgate focusing on PostgreSQL, talk with Path To Citus Con* co-hosts Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia to explore the learning resources available to developers and users in all the corners of the PostgreSQL world. What drives you to learn: need or curiosity? What can podcasts teach us while we bike to work? Are conference talks good for growing skills, or are they better for networking? What about books? And do older books still have much to offer? It turns out, most people need much more than one approach to build their knowledge. 

*[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 (many) links shared in the order they were mentioned: 

• Talk: Ryan’s talk Point-in-time query tuning and observability with pg_stat_statements at Citus Con: An Event for Postgres 2022
• Blog: Learning PostgreSQL with Grant, a series for SQL Server devs learning about Postgres  
• Podcast: postgres.fm, a weekly podcast about all things Postgres 
• Podcast: Path To Citus Con Episode 01: Working in public on open source
• Blog aggregator: Planet PostgreSQL 
• Email Newsletters: Cooperpress, including the Postgres Weekly email 
• Podcast: Scaling PostgreSQL with Creston Jamison 
• User Groups: PostgreSQL Community User Groups 
• Videos: pganalyze "5 minutes of Postgres," by Lukas Fittl 
• Book: The Art of PostgreSQL, by Dimitri Fontaine 
• Book: PostgreSQL Query Optimization: The Ultimate Guide to Building Efficient Queries, by Henrietta Dombrovskaya 
• Book: SQL Performance Explained, by Markus Winand 
• Blog: Modern SQL, by Markus Winand
• Blog: Use The Index, Luke, by Markus Winand
• Book: Database Administration, by Craig Mullins 
• Book: A Curious Moon, by Rob Conery 
• Book: The Little SQL Book, by Rob Conery, “Learn SQL While Watching Football This Weekend - Free!” 
• Event: PGDay Chicago 
• Blog: Redgate – Simple Talk 
• Videos: CMU Database Group’s Talks on YouTube: Quarantine (2020), First Dose (2021), Second Dose (2021),  Booster (2022) 
• Crunchy Data’s Postgres Playground 
• Blog: CYBERTEC 
• Blog: Citus Open Source Blog 
• Talk: How To Make Your Postgres Blog Posts Reach A Ton More People, by Claire Giordano
• Conference: PGCon 2023, super useful to watch recorded talks after the fact 
• Conference: PGConf.EU, 2022, good example of an in-person event with lots of opportunities for learning 
• Conference: Citus Con: An Event for Postgres 2023 
• Conference: PGConf NYC 2023 
• Blog Series: PGSQL Phriday, created by Ryan Booz
• Blog Series: PostgreSQL Person of the Week, by Andreas Scherbaum 
• Blog: Robert Haas' blog
• Blog: select * from depesz;
• Book: PostgreSQL 14 internals, by Egor Rogov

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 

Álvaro Herrera, and Boriss Mejías, both longtime members of the Postgres developer community, explore the value of giving conference talks—as well as the work involved, the time it takes, and the many different types of conference talks, including presentations about about failure and things that have gone wrong.  

In this episode of Path To Citus Con*, Claire and Pino guide the conversation on questions like: Should you add humor to your talks? How does your personality—introvert or extrovert—affect your conference presentations? Is it OK to give the same conference talk at different events?  

*[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 appeared: 

• Postgres Storytelling: Support in the Darkest Hour: Boriss’ Citus Con talk 
• A Curious Moon book by Rob Conery 
• Tomas Vondra's talks on YouTube
• pgDay Paris 2022
• FOSDEM PostgreSQL devroom
• FOSDEM PGDAY 2023
• Nordic PGDay 2022
• PGConf.EU 2022
• LFMF: How a CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY led to a 6 hour downtime by Gunnar "Nick" Bluth

Join Claire and Pino as they talk with Citus and Postgres open source team members to explore how to get Postgres ready for the next 100 million users. What will future Postgres users look like? How will the Postgres development process evolve with more users? What are the common challenges faced by Postgres users? 

 
Citus open source team members Abdullah Ustuner and Burak Yucesoy are joined by Postgres open source teammates Melanie Plageman and Samay Sharma—and co-hosts Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia—in this episode of Path To Citus Con*. Listen to the deep dive on what it means to scale the code and the community far beyond the Postgres world of today. 

*[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 links from the show in the order they were mentioned: 

• Additional IO Observability in Postgres: Melanie's talk at Citus Con 2023
• Optimizing Postgres for write heavy workloads ft. Checkpoint and WAL configs: Samay's talk at Citus Con 2023
• The Design of Postgres, by Michael Stonebraker and Lawrence A. Rowe, 1986 
• HyperLogLog 
• PostGIS 
• timescale/pgspot

Simon Willison is the creator of Datasette and co-creator of Django. Marco Slot is the lead architect for the Citus database extension to Postgres. In this episode of Path To Citus Con*, Simon and Marco talk about working in public on open source. Simon shares many of his learnings in public—with weeknotes, tweets, blogs, and “today I learned” (TIL) posts. Marco has been developing Citus in public since it was first open sourced in 2016. 

Hosted by Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia from the Postgres team at Microsoft, listen to find out how working in public can help “future you”—and how there are selfish benefits to be had by working in open source. (Also: how to stay positive in the face of critics?) 

*[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 topics covered in the order they were mentioned:

• Simon's weeknotes
• Simon's TIL posts
• Datasette plugins
• Citus open source GitHub repo
• Fibonacci Spirals and Ways to Contribute to Postgres—Beyond Code - Claire's talk in 2022
• Big Opportunities in Small Data - Simon's keynote at Citus Con: An Event for Postgres
• The Distributed PostgreSQL Problem and How Citus Solves It - Marco’s keynote at Citus Con: An Event for Postgres