Working in public on open source with Simon Willison & Marco Slot
Download MP3Simon Willison is the creator of Datasette and co-creator of Django. Marco Slot is the lead architect for the Citus database extension to Postgres. In this episode of Path To Citus Con*, Simon and Marco talk about working in public on open source. Simon shares many of his learnings in public—with weeknotes, tweets, blogs, and “today I learned” (TIL) posts. Marco has been developing Citus in public since it was first open sourced in 2016.
Hosted by Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia from the Postgres team at Microsoft, listen to find out how working in public can help “future you”—and how there are selfish benefits to be had by working in open source. (Also: how to stay positive in the face of critics?)
*[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
*[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 topics covered in the order they were mentioned:
- Simon's weeknotes
- Simon's TIL posts
- Datasette plugins
- Citus open source GitHub repo
- Fibonacci Spirals and Ways to Contribute to Postgres—Beyond Code - Claire's talk in 2022
- Big Opportunities in Small Data - Simon's keynote at Citus Con: An Event for Postgres
- The Distributed PostgreSQL Problem and How Citus Solves It - Marco’s keynote at Citus Con: An Event for Postgres
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.

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. Previously at GitHub and Google. Horseback rider, cook, and armchair movie critic.

Guest
Marco Slot
Mostly posts about PostgreSQL, Snowflake Postgres, and PostgreSQL extensions.Formerly Crunchy Data, Microsoft, Citus Data, AWS, TCD, VU

Guest
Simon Willison
Independent AI researcher, creator of datasette.io and llm.datasette.io, building open source tools for data journalism, writing about a lot of stuff at https://simonwillison.net/
