How I got started as a dev (& in Postgres) w/Melanie Plageman & Thomas Munro | PathToCitusCon Ep04

There are as many stories about how people got started in software as there are developers out there. In this episode of Path To Citus Con*, Melanie Plageman, Thomas Munro, Claire Giordano, and Pino de Candia 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. And finally, the cambrian explosion of Unix systems.
* 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: talkingpostgres.com
Guests Melanie Plageman and Thomas Munro:
Melanie Plageman is a Postgres hacker working at Microsoft. She has worked on the Postgres executor, planner, storage, MVCC, and statistics subsystems. Most recently she has been hacking on the proposed asynchronous and direct IO patch set. Melanie is passionate about writing maintainable code and building developer tools.
Thomas Munro is a PostgreSQL developer and committer based in New Zealand. He began working full time on PostgreSQL and related technologies about 8 years ago, first at EnterpriseDB and now at Microsoft. Before that Thomas worked with Unix and relational databases in the web, finance, and software industries.
Co-hosted by Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia:
Claire Giordano is head of the Postgres & Citus 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.
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.
Chapters:
⏩ 00:00 Introducing Path To Citus Con Ep04!
⏩ 02:20 How Melanie got started as a developer?
⏩ 05:04 Melanie recommends: From Nand to Tetris
⏩ 11:07 How did Thomas get started as a developer?
⏩ 21:00 Claire intended to be a patent attorney
⏩ 27:37 How Pino got started as a developer
⏩ 30:33 Thomas’s first patch to Postgres
⏩ 40:35 Open source aspect of Postgres
⏩ 48:06 Melanie spent a year focused on Postgres
⏩ 57:33 Are other contributor stories the same?
⏩ 59:49 Is being a developer all sunshine and roses?
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Twitter - @CitusCon, / cituscon
Links from this episode:
From Nand to Tetris: www.nand2tetris.org/book
Thomas and Melanie's talks from Citus Con: An Event for Postgres:
▪️ Thomas Munros’ talk about Parallelism in Postgres : • Parallelism in Postgre...
▪️ Melanie Plageman's talk about Additional IO Observability in Postgres with pg_stat_io: • Additional IO Observab...
▪️Thomas' 2022 talk about Queues in PostgreSQL: • Queues in PostgreSQL |...
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