How I got started as a developer with Andres Freund & Heikki Linnakangas | Path To Citus Con Ep08

Lots of stories of how folks got started as developers! Andres Freund and Heikki Linnakangas join Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia to explore more paths for getting into Postgres on Path To Citus Con*, the podcast for developers who love Postgres. How do you do development: with a cup of coffee, with music in the background, maybe at 3am? How do you approach mentoring other developers? Why did you stick with Postgres and make it a career? Lots of lively discussion about building not only code, but relationships in the community, in the open. Also, stories about Heikki’s and Andres’s first Postgres patch submissions, and working via the hackers mailing list. Finally, what advice would you give to your younger self starting in the development world?
* 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 Andres Freund and Heikki Linnakangas:
Andres is a PostgreSQL committer and developer, focusing on replication, scalability, efficiency and robustness. At Microsoft he works full time on upstream PostgreSQL. Before that he worked EDB, Citus Data, 2ndQuadrant and as a freelancing consultant in the areas of databases and software engineering. In his free time he enjoys climbing, woodworking and reading paper books.
Heikki is a PostgreSQL committer, and now co-founder of Neon. He has worked on many different parts of the codebase, including storage, executor and indexing.
Co-hosted by Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia:
Claire Giordano is head of the Postgres and Citus open source community initiatives at Microsoft. Prior to the Microsoft acquisition of Citus Data, Claire 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 Intro and starting as developers
⏩ 12:47 Getting started with Postgres!
⏩ 16:42 Depth and breadth of projects Andres & Heikki have worked on
⏩ 21:20 The (surprising) first patch process
⏩ 26:10 Sticking with Postgres and getting a job
⏩ 36:01 HOW do you program? Getting in the zone.
⏩ 41:17 What does it mean to be a Postgres hacker?
⏩ 45:13 Mentoring other contributors
⏩ 55:39 What is the Postgres Core Team?
⏩ 1:06:56 What advice would you give to your younger self?
✅ Listen to more episodes of Path To Citus Con:
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📅 Subscribe to the monthly Path To Citus Con calendar:
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Links mentioned in this episode, in the order they were covered:
🔹Neon: neon.tech/
🔹Path To Citus Con Ep04: pathtocituscon.transistor.fm/...
🔹Andres’s first patch to Postgres: git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=...
🔹PGConf NYC 2023: 2023.pgconf.nyc/
🔹Flow book: www.google.com/books/edition/...
🔹Archives of Postgres hackers mailing list: www.postgresql.org/list/pgsql...
🔹List of Postgres Contributors: www.postgresql.org/community/...
🔹Description of Postgres Core Team: www.postgresql.org/developer/...
🔹Postgres Weekly newsletter: postgresweekly.com/
#PathToCitusCon #TalkingPostgres #PostgreSQL

[@dn8601]

Our savior

[@sleepingzzs976]

Is this the same guy who found out the backdoor in xz?

[@tjnangosha]

Well, that was fast. My search also led me here.

[@clairegiordano4636]

Yes, Andres Freund is a Microsoft engineer, Postgres committer, brilliant engineer, and now... the engineer who found the backdoor in xz.

[@The_IW]

Who is here after XZ utils backdoor story?

[@sleepingzzs976]

me!

[@nicejungle]

me 😉

[@varshneydevansh]

great vid

[@varshneydevansh]

OSS is something where I gravitated towards. Would be great if you have a chat with Scott Hanselman fro MS.