How I got started as a dev and in Postgres with Melanie Plageman & Thomas Munro
Talking Postgres with Claire GiordanoShow Notes
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
More from Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano
Who knew an aptitude test could recommend a career as a DBA—and get it right? In Episode 44 of Talking Postgres, PostgreSQL significant contributor Karen Jex walks Claire through her path from Oracle DBA to Postgres consultant, solution architect, and now senior software engineer at Snowflake. My favorite bits: a project switched to Postgres when nobody knew how to install it, faking it as the Postgres expert, and the culture shock of building your own HA and backups. Plus: the warm welcome at PGConf EU 2019 that pulled Karen into the Postgres community; the new Buddy Program at PGConf EU 2026; and moving to the French Alps for the love of mountain biking. Previously on Talking Postgres: Talking Postgres podcast Ep39: From MemSQL to HorizonDB, an engineer's journey with Adam Prout Talking Postgres podcast Ep42: How AI is changing software development with Simon Willison Links mentioned in this episode: Conference: PGConf.EU 2026 in Valencia on 20-23 Oct Save the date for: POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2027, happening 30 & 31 March 2027 Two days this time: FOSDEM PGDay 2027, happening 28 & 29 Jan 2027 Conference: PGConf.dev 2027 in Montréal Conference: PG Day France Conference: PGConf India 2027, on 2-5 March 2027 Conference: EuroPython 2026 PGConf.EU conference talk: Tuning Postgres for Analytics, by Karen Jex DjangoCon Europe 2024 keynote: When I Grow Up I Want to be a Database Administrator, by Karen Jex POSETTE speaker page: Karen Jex, with videos of her talks PGConf.EU 2023 talk: Elephant in a nutshell - Navigating the Postgres community 101, by Valeria Kaplan FOSDEM 2020 talk slides: Fibonacci Spirals and 21 Ways to Contribute to Postgres—Beyond Code, by Claire Giordano PostgreSQL.org: Contributor Profiles PostgreSQL Europe: PostgreSQL Europe board PostgreSQL docs: PostgreSQL 19 release notes Voice dictation: Wispr Flow Voice dictation: FluidVoice In this episode, we covered: 00:00 Intro & music 01:55 Becoming a DBA completely by accident 05:46 "You're the database expert. You can figure it out." 12:37 Leaving Oracle, where everything comes bundled 17:23 From DBA to helping other DBAs 21:48 The PGDay France meeting that opened up the community 28:02 Why Django developers love Postgres 34:36 Stepping back to be close to home 43:54 "When I grow up, I want to be a DBA," said no one ever 51:42 How much should you delegate to AI agents? 59:22 Thirty five buddy pairings at PGConf EU
How does a fix for psql tab completion turn into 25 years of contributing to Postgres? In Episode 43 of Talking Postgres, Peter Eisentraut—PostgreSQL committer, core team member, SQL standards contributor, and Chief Architect of Database Servers at EDB—joins Claire to trace that journey. We dig into how scratch-your-own-itch development drew him in, why “the things you do, people welcome them” kept him coming back, and how Postgres changed as it grew from a small database community into a massive ecosystem where, from the Postgres mailing list perspective, “most of the user base is silent.” Plus: what it feels like when code you commit goes straight to everybody who uses Postgres, and the implications of the EU Cyber Resilience Act. Previously on Talking Postgres: Talking Postgres podcast Ep24: Why mentor Postgres developers with Robert Haas Talking Postgres podcast Ep26: Open Source Leadership with Bruce Momjian Talking Postgres podcast Ep32: The Fundamental Interconnectedness of All Things with Boriss Mejías Links mentioned in this episode: Conference: FOSDEM 2027 LinkedIn: FOSDEM PGDay 2027 announcement Conference: Prague PostgreSQL Developers Day (P2D2) Conference: PGDay Lowlands 2026 (the “friendliest” conference) Conference: PGConf EU 2026 in Valencia on 20-23 Oct PGConfEU Conference talk: What does the EU Cyber Resilience Act mean for PostgreSQL and its community Wikipedia: EU Cyber Resilience Act PGConf.dev on LinkedIn: PGConf.dev account PGConf.dev conference talk: Committer Review: An Exercise in Paranoia, by Robert Haas PostgreSQL.org: Committers PostgreSQL mailing list: Postgres 19 release management team Blog: Peter Eisentraut Blog Blog post: Where are all the PostgreSQL users, by Peter Eisentraut PGCA non-profit: PostgreSQL Community Association Brett Cannon at PyCon 2014: I came for the language but I stayed for the community Planet PostgreSQL: Blog aggregation feed In this episode, we covered: 00:00 Intro & music 02:14 Tinkering with the Commodore 64 07:57 The itch that became psql tab completion 15:43 Had to make opportunities 23:05 From posting at night to posting during the day 24:40 Why he stopped committing in the afternoon 28:04 On the ground floor of something that grew 30:34 What the Postgres core team actually does 31:47 Borrowing ideas from other OSS projects 36:51 Bringing Postgres into the SQL standards process 38:40 Getting to hang out with database nerds 42:01 Mentoring Postgres contributors 50:56 Making time for Postgres conferences 53:35 What the Cyber Resilience Act means for Postgres 57:36 Where are all the Postgres users? 1:07:00 Becoming a committer early on in Postgres 1:16:22 Contributing to Postgres isn't just writing code 1:19:40 Why FOSDEM is still his favorite 1:22:15 Finding familiar problems in a compiler devroom 1:26:14 Shout-out to the Planet Postgres feed
What’s your gold standard for deciding whether AI-written code is ready for production? In Episode 42 of Talking Postgres, Simon Willison—creator of Datasette, co-creator of Django, and prolific open-source developer—joins Claire to share how AI is changing the way he builds software today. We dig into why his test for shipping AI-generated code is “Could I explain this to somebody else?”, how engineering management skills can be surprisingly useful when managing AI agents, and how the bottleneck is no longer writing code but understanding it. Also: personal credibility, deep research, the Winchester Mystery House, slop proxies, and Simon’s observation that “Features are cheap. That doesn’t mean you should build them all.”
What happens when a database engineer spends 13 years on SQL Server and then starts working on Postgres? In Episode 41 of Talking Postgres, Distinguished Engineer Panagiotis “Panos” Antonopoulos of Microsoft joins Claire to share what surprised him most about making that transition. We explore why Postgres felt familiar from the start—and what shocked Panos about the clean and lean Postgres codebase. We also dig into how public mailing lists and AI can help explain why design decisions were made, why more people are asking “why not Postgres?”, and the shared-storage architecture behind Azure HorizonDB.
Intensely local user groups have been part of Jeremy Schneider's story from the start—from Linux meetups at a Michigan coffee shop to a closet server running an Oracle database nobody knew anything about. In Episode 40 of Talking Postgres, Postgres engineer and Seattle Postgres User Group co-organizer Jeremy Schneider joins Claire to share how community led him to Postgres after 15 years with Oracle—and why "it's like I was born to be here." Plus: the newly-updated Postgres Happiness Hints poster, advice for starting your own user group, and his POSETTE 2026 talk on CloudNativePG. Previously on Talking Postgres: Talking Postgres Ep 38: How I went from Oracle to Postgres (with a big NoSQL detour) with Gwen Shapira Links mentioned in this episode: Seattle Postgres User Group: Meetup page Seattle Postgres User Group: YouTube channel User Group Map from PGConfEU 2025 talk: 48 Postgres User Groups during PG18 timeframe PostgreSQL.org: Listing of local Postgres User Groups Postgres Meetup For All (a virtual meetup): Meetup page Jeremy Schneider’s Blog: Ardent Performance Computing Poster: Postgres Happiness Hints PGConf.dev 2026: Posters from Poster Session PGConf.dev 2026 Poster Session: Talking Postgres poster POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2026: Jeremy’s POSETTE 2026 talk with Leonardo Cecchi POSETTE 2026: Livestream 3 schedule & talks Oracle docs: Oracle Database Concepts PDF Book: Oracle Insights: Tales of the Oak Table