How I got started as a dev and in Postgres with Melanie Plageman & Thomas Munro
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
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.
Host
Pino de Candia
Pino de Candia is a software dev manager at Microsoft since 2020 and is currently working on the Citus open source project. Pino previously worked on the managed PostgreSQL database service in Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL, which includes Citus on Azure support for distributed PostgreSQL. Pino has lived in New Orleans since 2017.
Producer
Aaron Wislang
Open Source Engineering + Developer Relations at Microsoft + Azure ☁️ | Go (golang), Cloud Native, Linux 🐧 🐍 🦀 ☕ 🍷📷 🎹 | Toronto 🇨🇦🌎 | 💨😷💉 | https://aaronw.dev/hello/
Producer
Carol Smith
Senior Program Manager at Microsoft in the Citus Community team. Previously at GitHub and Google. Horseback rider, cook, and armchair movie critic.
