Bits of wisdom from a year of Talking Postgres

This post by Claire Giordano was originally published on the Microsoft Tech Community Blog.

A year ago we renamed the Talking Postgres podcast—and just published our 29th episode. Since it’s a monthly thing, that means 13 new conversations in the past year. So this feels like a good moment to pause, reflect, and share a few highlights.

If you’re already a listener, this post might help you find an episode you missed. If you’re new to the podcast, think of this as a sampler: a few favorite quotes, some backstory, and quick-hit summaries of each episode from the past year.

What is the Talking Postgres podcast? It's a long-form conversation—usually an hour, often more—with people in the Postgres world. We talk about what they do with Postgres, why they do it, and how they got started. (I’m a bit obsessed with origin stories.)

The show isn’t about features or how-to’s. It’s not about speeds and feeds. And it’s definitely not trying to sell you anything. It’s about the people behind Postgres—and what we can learn from each other.

In this post you’ll get highlights from the past 13 episodes of Talking Postgres, shared in reverse chronological order. These summaries can’t do the full episodes justice, but maybe they’ll inspire you to listen in.

And if you’re not a podcast person, maybe it's time to give it a try? Podcast listening in the US has grown from 170 million hours a week in 2015 to over 770 million hours per week in 2025. (Source: Share of Ear survey from Edison Research, via Podnews.net).

A listener’s take: Talking Postgres as “oral history”

Last October, I got a text from Thomas Munro—one of the Postgres committers, and someone I deeply respect. He said:

“btw, random comment: i think talking postgres is very cool, going very well, and i love what you are doing”

Naturally, I wanted to know more. So I asked. Thomas's reply:

“it's just a great podcast, you have a relaxed way to get people talking, and people are at ease with you. it’s a perfect format, and it feels quite natural. i don’t know, i just like it. the name is also working well. i was happy to see robert [haas] mentioning it the other day. it's a really nice part of the ecosystem and brings a positive human dimension to it. it's also a kind of documentary, a kind of oral history for the postgresql community.”

As Bruce Momjian likes to say, it costs nothing to show gratitude. The note from Thomas made my day that day—and I’m sharing it here in case it nudges someone else to give the podcast a listen.

From dreaming of driving a bus to leading database engineering at Microsoft

Shireesh Thota joined me to unpack his journey from early BASIC programming to leading all of database engineering at Microsoft Azure. (Fun fact: his childhood dream was to be a bus driver.)

I’ll admit, I thought it might be intimidating to interview my boss’s boss. But it wasn’t. Shireesh was down-to-earth, thoughtful, and full of stories—especially about the shift from IC to manager. One of his early lessons? You can’t manage people in the same way you write code.

Highlights of "How I got started leading database teams with Shireesh Thota"

• The shift from developer to manager (if only people came with documentation)
• Why it’s important for Microsoft to contribute to the PostgreSQL open source project
• Whether Shireesh has a favorite database (hint: I want it to be Postgres)
• Are there any plans to open source the new VS Code extension for Postgres?

What drives someone to publish 600+ issues of a Postgres newsletter?

I’d been wanting to get Peter Cooper on the podcast for a while. Peter is the creator of Postgres Weekly—my favorite developer newsletter—and the person behind a whole collection of dev newsletters that reach nearly half a million people each week.

But how to get Peter to a yes? I was still pondering that when Michael Christofides (founder of pgMustard, past guest on Talking Postgres, and co-host of Postgres FM) had the same idea: “You should invite Peter Cooper.”

As luck would have it, Peter—who lives in the UK—was visiting the San Francisco Bay Area. We met for coffee (no coffee was actually consumed), I pitched the idea, and he said yes.

Highlights of "12 years of Postgres Weekly with Peter Cooper"

• How Peter built a newsletter empire that reaches nearly half a million developers each week
• Trends in Postgres he’s seen from the editor’s seat
• How the BBC's “big tent” shapes Peter’s editorial (& opinionated) voice
• Where he finds the good stuff (all the useful Postgres links)

How does a trek to K2 base camp spark the idea for a database startup?

In this episode, Peter Farkas shared the origin story of FerretDB, an open source MongoDB alternative that first became an idea at 16,000 feet at the Himalayan K2 base camp. (Spoiler: “Ferret” wasn’t the original name.) We also talked about why Postgres was the obvious choice for FerretDB—and how Peter’s background in customer support has shaped his world view.

Highlights of "How I got started with FerretDB & why we chose Postgres with Peter Farkas"

• What “true open source” means to Peter and FerretDB
• How FerretDB now runs on the new, open-sourced DocumentDB extension
• How Hungarian Trappist cheese 🧀 deserves a footnote in database history

What does it take to lead a global open source project like Postgres?

Bruce Momjian and I were both at PGConf India in Bangalore when he said yes to joining the podcast. Bruce has been part of Postgres since 1996, and he’s spent decades giving talks, writing, and teaching others about the database. So we had too many good topics to choose from.

We landed on one that felt especially relevant: what it means to lead in open source. Bruce shared stories, lessons, and a perspective that only comes from being in the trenches for nearly 30 years.

Highlights of "Open Source Leadership with Bruce Momjian"

• Why servant leadership is such a good fit for open source
• How being open to feedback can lead to a much higher quality result
• Tips on becoming a good conference speaker
• How it doesn’t cost you anything to show appreciation to people
• Bruce’s early days on the project, co-founding the PostgreSQL Global Development Group

Why so many Python developers have an affinity for Postgres

When I first met Dawn Wages, we somehow got onto the topic of her book-in-progress, Domain-Driven Django. One chapter title jumped out at me: “Just Use Postgres.” Of course, I had questions.

At the time, Dawn was President of the Python Software Foundation—and I was curious to hear how a Django developer thinks about Postgres. Why do so many Python and Django devs seem to have such affection for it? This one’s part origin story, part practical wisdom, and part homage to Postgres.

Highlights of "Why Python developers just use Postgres with Dawn Wages"

• Why does a book for Django developers deserve a chapter on Postgres?
• Why “free as in puppies” beats “free as in cake”
• How making really smart friends helps you in work (and in life)
• Is Python the second-best language for everything?
• Fun fact: Did you know PostgreSQL.org is built with Django?

Why mentor? Because nobody works on an open-source project forever—eventually people move on

Quote from Robert Haas:

“I think we're all hoping that there will be more people coming along after us who want to pick up the torch and continue to make PostgreSQL amazing. But I think also we'd like to not just sustain the community but to really see it grow. We'd like PostgreSQL to have more developers in the future than it does today and to have a greater pace of development than it does today. And I think that mentoring is a way that we can try to help that happen.”

Highlights of "Why mentor Postgres developers with Robert Haas"

• Why did Robert kickstart the new PostgreSQL Hackers mentoring program?
• How Robert channeled “what would Tom Lane do?” during patch reviews
• How being willing to admit you don't know how to do something properly (yet) is an important part of getting better at it

How walking into a Postgres session at a Linux conference changed everything

Quote from Daniel Gustafsson:

“And I was sitting there, being completely blown away, realizing that this database has everything that I need and want. It has PL/Perl. I can write everything as a stored procedure. It was the programming environment that I was looking for, but I didn't know existed. And so from that day and time, I have not used any other database.”

Highlights of "How I got started as a developer & in Postgres with Daniel Gustafsson"

• The story of one of Daniel’s earliest memories: a Datasaab M10 computer—or as Daniel described it: “a giant steel box in the family study”
• Exact date, time, & location a chance LinuxForum encounter with Bruce Momjian changed the course of Daniel's career
• Daniel's take on the magic of conferences in the Postgres community—including Nordic PGDay, PGconfdev, & POSETTE
• Advice for Daniel’s younger self: “don’t be afraid to ask for help”

What’s it like to lead Postgres engineering at a cloud giant like Microsoft?

This episode with Affan Dar, who heads up engineering for Postgres at Microsoft, was a fun one. Many of the guests on Talking Postgres come from the open source community, but this time we switched it up, and spoke with the Azure engineering leader who’s steering all of the Postgres work at Microsoft (including the open source contributors team.)

Highlights of "Leading engineering for Postgres on Azure with Affan Dar"

• What it's like to lead the engineering team behind Azure Database for PostgreSQL
• The strategy behind Microsoft's investments into Postgres
• Is Postgres extensibility a double-edged sword?
• Affan’s experiences switching between individual contributor & management roles (& back)

Have you ever achieved something remarkable because someone planted an idea in your mind?

Andrew Atkinson is a software developer who got deeper into Postgres as he and his team tackled scale and reliability challenges. But what makes Andrew’s story stand out is what he did next: he wrote a book to share what he learned—specifically for Rails developers.

But the idea for the book didn’t come out of nowhere. It was planted by someone else. And that spark turned into a popular new book about PostgreSQL.

Highlights of "Helping Rails developers learn Postgres with Andrew Atkinson"

• Tackling scalability challenges in Rails
• The story behind Andrew’s book, High Performance PostgreSQL for Rails
• The idea behind "writing is thinking"
• The connection between Andrew's Postgres book and swimming to Antarctica

It was not Tom Lane’s plan to become a computer person

Tom Lane is a legend in the PostgreSQL contributor community and it was an honor to have him on the podcast. His origin story? Not what you’d expect. He originally wanted to be a pinball machine designer—and only later found his way into databases. Thank goodness he eventually went down the rabbit hole and discovered how interesting Postgres is. Because once he did, he never looked back.

Highlights of "How I got started as a developer & in Postgres with Tom Lane"

• Getting nudged by a professor to apply to be a research assistant
• Going down a bug-fixing rabbithole, starting with bugs in a port to HP-UX
• The importance of adopting a mindset that embraces feedback
• One of the things about working in open source: your failures are inherently extremely public

If you could work on anything, would you quit your job to pursue it?

Melanie Plageman did exactly that. She left her job to go deep on Postgres—writing an extension, watching every Andy Pavlo video ever, and eventually becoming a Postgres committer. So many of us learn from Melanie and this episode is full of her hard-won insights. Also this, one of my favorite quotes from the podcast:

“When you're getting feedback, it's not necessarily about whether or not you're good at engineering—or your patch is a good patch. It's about whether or not it's the right thing for Postgres. Not taking things personally—and thinking about it more from the perspective of ‘how can I make my work a better fit for Postgres’ makes it hurt a little bit less.”

–Melanie Plageman

Highlights of "Becoming a Postgres committer with Melanie Plageman"

• How Melanie quit her job and proceeded to learn everything she could about Postgres
• Writing a Postgres extension as a way to learn about Postgres (and land a job!)
• The value of mentorship, karma, and paying it forward
• What’s it like to get so deep in code you lose the ability to relate to people?
• The enormous weight of the Postgres committer responsibility

How driving a forklift at a cheese factory led to a career in databases

David Rowley’s origin story is full of surprises. He started out driving a forklift in a cheese factory—and ended up becoming a go-to expert on Postgres performance.

This episode is a fan favorite (and it even inspired Daniel Gustafsson to come on the show a few months later.) One of the most useful takeaways? David’s advice on how to make your work stand out: do the research, read the archives, and show that you’ve done your homework.

Highlights of "How I got started as a developer & in Postgres with David Rowley"

• David’s unusual origin story: from driving a forklift in a cheese factory to writing software
• Reading the manual for Postgres 9.1 in a remote part of Australia (because there weren’t a great deal of other things to do in the evenings)
• How speeding up Postgres gives a similar sort of buzz to tuning motorbike performance
• Appreciating the very high standards in the Postgres contributor community

Have you ever eavesdropped on other people’s conversations?

Pino de Candia co-hosted the first year of this podcast with me—back when it was still called Path To Citus Con, before we renamed the show. In this episode, he came back for a meta-conversation about what we’ve learned from podcasting about Postgres, and what it’s like to record these conversations live.

We also took a walk down memory lane, revisiting some of our favorite bits from the first 16 episodes—and the guests who shared their Postgres stories with us.

Highlights of "Podcasting about Postgres with Pino de Candia"

• Is listening to a podcast the next best thing to being in the hallway track at a conference?
• Why it’s worth making the investment to understand Postgres not just at a technical level but also to get to know the community and the project’s history
• What it’s like to record the podcasts live on Discord, with a parallel live text chat
• Shout-outs to other useful Postgres podcasts, including Postgres FM and Scaling Postgres

Help more people discover Talking Postgres

You can find all the episodes—plus high quality transcripts—on TalkingPostgres.com, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’ve enjoyed the podcast, there are a few easy ways to help more Postgres folks discover it:

• Leave a review or rating (5 stars is always appreciated)
• Tell a friend or teammate
• Subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes

Word of mouth is still one of the best ways to spread the word.

We record the podcast LIVE on Discord (you’re invited)

If you didn’t know, we record Talking Postgres live on the Microsoft Open Source Discord, with a parallel live text chat. It usually happens at 10am PT on the first or second Wednesday of the month.

Want to listen in live? You can:

• Follow the Talking Postgres live recording calendar
• Or join the Microsoft Open Source Discord and mark yourself as “interested” in upcoming events. That way, you’ll get notified via Discord right before we go live.

Thank you to the people who make this podcast possible

I’m humbled by every guest who’s joined the show—starting with the very first episode about Working in public on open source with Simon Willison and Marco Slot. Every guest has brought something different: stories, insights, and their unique journeys with Postgres.

Huge thanks to Aaron Wislang of Microsoft, who’s been co-producing the podcast since day one. And to the cohort of Postgres friends who keep encouraging me to do this: Daniel Gustafsson, Melanie Plageman, Thomas Munro, and Boriss Mejías. Also a big shout-out to Pino de Candia, my co-host for the first year. And to my boss Charles Feddersen for supporting this podcast and all of my Postgres open source contributor work.

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