12 years of Postgres Weekly with Peter Cooper
What 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
- Cal invite: LIVE recording of Ep29 of Talking Postgres to happen on Wed Jul 9, 2025
Creators and Guests
Host
Claire Giordano
Claire Giordano is head of the Postgres open source community initiatives at Microsoft. Claire has served in leadership roles in engineering, product management, and product marketing at Sun Microsystems, Amazon/A9, and Citus Data. At Sun, Claire managed the engineering team that created Solaris Zones, and led the effort to open source Solaris.
Producer
Aaron Wislang
Open Source Engineering + Developer Relations at Microsoft + Azure ☁️ | Go (golang), Cloud Native, Linux 🐧 🐍 🦀 ☕ 🍷📷 🎹 | Toronto 🇨🇦🌎 | 💨😷💉 | https://aaronw.dev/hello/
