12 years of Postgres Weekly with Peter Cooper
Download MP3What drives someone to publish 600+ issues of a Postgres newsletter for over a decade? In Episode 28 of Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano, Peter Cooper—creator of Postgres Weekly—shares how his days of rustic programming and QBASIC fanzines on Usenet led to a newsletter empire that now reaches nearly half a million developers each week. We dig into the BBC's "big tent" editorial influence, an accidental business model that just worked, and the perils of "temporary" hacks. Plus: spam filters, a Photoshop addiction, and one very cheesy story (dairy-free).
Links mentioned in this episode:
Links mentioned in this episode:
- Newsletter: Postgres Weekly
- Cooperpress: List of newsletters
- Newsletter: Latest issue of Postgres Weekly on Jun 19, 2025
- Newsletter: Postgres Weekly issue with horrible graphic
- Newsletter: Very first issue of Postgres Weekly on Mar 13, 2013
- Newsletter: Ruby Weekly, the first Cooperpress newsletter
- Book: Beginning Ruby Third Edition, by Peter Cooper
- Podcast episode: How I got started as a developer (& in Postgres) with David Rowley
- Feed reader: Feedbin
- GitHub repo: feedbin/feedbin
- Feed reader: Feeder
- Email testing software: Litmus
- GitHub repo: MGML markup language for email
- Paper: The Design of Postgres
- GitHub repo: PGRX for building Postgres extensions in Rust
- Podcast news: Podnews.net for daily briefings about podcasts
- Wikipedia page: BBC Micro
- Wikipedia page: ZX Spectrum
Creators and Guests
Host
Claire Giordano
Head of open source community efforts for Postgres at Microsoft. Ex-Citus Data, Amazon, Sun Microsystems, and Brown University CS. Serves on PGCA board. Prolific Postgres conference speaker. Co-creator of POSETTE: An Event for Postgres. Loves sailing in Greece.
Producer
Aaron Wislang
Principal Software Engineer (Open Source Engineering + Azure Core Upstream) at Microsoft + Azure ☁️ | Go (golang), Cloud Native, Linux 🐧 🐍 🦀 ☕ 🍷📷 🎹 | Toronto 🇨🇦🌎 | 💨😷💉 | https://aaronw.dev/hello/
