Drop the fear, not the tables. Chelsea Dole and Floor Drees join Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia to explore the app developer perspective on Path To Citus Con*, the podcast for developers who love Postgres. If you’re an app developer, you’re probably already using Postgres. Now what? What do you need to know? Are databases your best friend or your worst enemy? They talk about the steps to becoming more Postgres-savvy. Should you go depth-first or breadth-first in order to learn more about the underlying database? What are Postgres extensions and how do you go about adopting them? Find out more about the strength of what Floor calls “boring technology.” Finally, both guests tell stories of their non-traditional entries into Postgres that led to their deep work with databases 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

Links mentioned in this episode: 

• Fintech startup where Chelsea works, Brex: https://www.brex.com/  
• Open source data platform where Floor works, Aiven: https://aiven.io/  
• “Mission-Critical PostgreSQL Databases on Kubernetes" by Karen Jex at KubeCon Europe 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NBQ9JmOMko 
• The Imposters Handbook by Rob Conery: https://bigmachine.io/products/the-imposters-handbook/ 
• Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/designing-data-intensive-applications/9781491903063/  
• Devopsdays Amsterdam: https://devopsdays.org/events/2023-amsterdam/welcome/  
• Building Community in Open Source with Floor Drees on the Last Week in AWS podcast: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/building-community-in-open-source-with-floor-drees/ 
• pg_stat_statements: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/pgstatstatements.html 
• PostGIS: https://postgis.net/  
• “Postgres tips for optimizing Django & Python performance, from my PyCon workshop” by Louise Grandjonc: https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2020/05/20/postgres-tips-for-django-and-python/  
• Video of Louise’s PyCon talk, Optimize Django & Python performance with Postgres superpowers: https://youtu.be/dyBLGjCQJHs
• Grafana: https://grafana.com/
• pganalyze: https://pganalyze.com/ 
• auto_explain: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/auto-explain.html 
• EXPLAIN ANALYZE in PostgreSQL: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-explain.html  
• psql: https://www.postgresguide.com/utilities/psql/ 
• Path To Citus Con Episode 05: My favorite ways to learn more about PostgreSQL with Grant Fritchey and Ryan Booz: https://talkingpostgres.com/episodes/my-favorite-ways-to-learn-more-about-postgresql-with-grant-fritchey-and-ryan-booz 
• Coffee Meets Bagel (dating app): https://coffeemeetsbagel.com/