From dreaming of driving a bus to leading database engineering at Microsoft. In Episode 29 of Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano , Shireesh Thota traces his path to becoming CVP of Azure databases—rooted in a love of math, early BASIC programming, and a certainty that he’d become an engineer. We dig into the shift from engineer to manager (if only people came with documentation); why it’s so important for Microsoft to contribute to the PostgreSQL open source project—not just consume it; and w...
Jul 11, 2025•57 min•Ep. 29
What drives someone to publish 600+ issues of a Postgres newsletter for over a decade? In Episode 28 of Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano , Peter Cooper —creator of Postgres Weekly—shares how his days of rustic programming and QBASIC fanzines on Usenet led to a newsletter empire that now reaches nearly half a million developers each week. We dig into the BBC's "big tent" editorial influence, an accidental business model that just worked, and the perils of "temporary" hacks. Plus: spam filter...
Jun 20, 2025•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 28
How does a trek to K2 base camp in the Himalayas spark the idea for a database company? In Episode 27 of Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano , guest Peter Farkas —CEO and co-founder of FerretDB—shares the origin story of this open source MongoDB alternative. (Spoiler: “Ferret” wasn’t the original name). We dig into why Postgres was the obvious choice, what “true open source” means to Peter, and how FerretDB is now powered by the open source DocumentDB extension from Microsoft. Plus, why Hungar...
May 09, 2025•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 27
What does it take to lead a global open source project like Postgres? In Episode 26 of Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano , we sit down with Bruce Momjian —co-founder and core team member of the PostgreSQL Global Development Group—to explore the art of leadership in a volunteer-run open source community. Bruce shares what “servant leadership” really means; how saying I’m sorry can help make problems go away; and how letting go of who-gets-the-credit can fuel collaboration. We also dive into B...
Apr 04, 2025•1 hr 48 min•Ep. 26
When I found out that Django developer and Python Software Foundation chair Dawn Wages has a chapter in her upcoming Domain-Driven Django book called “Just Use Postgres”, I knew we had to get her on the show. In this episode of Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano , Dawn breaks down why so many Python and Django developers have such an affinity for Postgres. And we dive into the Djangonaut Space mentoring program (where contributors launch), learn why “free as in puppies” beats “free as in cake...
Mar 14, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 25
Nobody works on an open-source project forever—eventually, people move on. So of course today's Postgres contributors want to see more developers join the project, pick up the torch, and continue to make Postgres amazing. Hence the importance of mentorship. In this episode of Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano , PostgreSQL major contributor and committer Robert Haas shares how he learned the ropes in Postgres by channeling “what would Tom Lane do” during patch reviews; why he launched the new...
Feb 07, 2025•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 24
March 5th 2005 at 3 PM in Copenhagen. That’s the exact time and place Daniel Gustafsson’s career took an unexpected turn, pivoting from operating systems to databases. At LinuxForum that day, Daniel had planned to meet up with the FreeBSD community, but a chance session about Postgres by Bruce Momjian completely blew his mind. By the time Daniel was on the train back to Malmö, he was already compiling Postgres. In this episode of Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano , Postgres major contributor...
Jan 17, 2025•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 23
What’s it like to lead Postgres engineering at a cloud giant like Microsoft Azure? In this episode of Talking Postgres, host Claire Giordano chats with Affan Dar , VP of Engineering for Postgres at Microsoft. Affan’s team is behind the Azure Database for PostgreSQL managed service and also contributes extensively to the upstream Postgres open-source project. Affan walks us through his career journey—from his first job as an embedded systems engineer, to navigating the shift between engineering a...
Dec 06, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 22
Have you ever achieved something remarkable because someone planted an idea in your mind? In this episode of Talking Postgres, host Claire Giordano talks with Andrew Atkinson —a Rails developer and Postgres user whose journey to becoming a published author began with a simple seed of inspiration. Andrew’s story started with an internal presentation on how to tackle tricky scalability challenges in Rails, grew into a Postgres conference talk at PGConf NYC—and ultimately evolved into his book, Hig...
Nov 15, 2024•1 hr 34 min•Ep. 21
It was not Tom Lane’s plan to become a computer person. Tom’s plan was to be a pinball machine designer. And yet for the last 26 years Tom has been one of the most prolific engineering contributors to Postgres. In this episode of Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano , PostgreSQL luminary Tom Lane walks us through how he got his start as a developer and in Postgres—including his time working on desktop calculators at HP. And how he has code running on Mars (and most of us don’t.) During Tom’s Ph...
Oct 11, 2024•1 hr 39 min•Ep. 20
If you could work on anything, would you quit your job to pursue it? Postgres committer and major contributor Melanie Plageman joined Claire Giordano on this episode of the Talking Postgres podcast (formerly Path To Citus Con) to share her story about becoming a Postgres committer. Melanie pivoted from IT consulting to open-source development, driven by her fascination with systems engineering and Postgres open source. What’s the secret to getting your patch committed? Feedback is a gift, but ho...
Sep 20, 2024•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 19
Ever wonder how driving a forklift at a cheese factory could lead to a career in databases? Postgres committer David Rowley joined Claire Giordano on this episode of the Talking Postgres podcast (formerly Path To Citus Con) to share his story about how he got started as a developer and in Postgres. Could an unexpected job lead to your dream career? Does speeding things up give you a buzz? How could an idea from a hike become a Postgres patch? And what is the importance of doing the research befo...
Aug 09, 2024•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 18
Have you ever eavesdropped on other people’s conversations? Former co-host Pino de Candia joins Claire Giordano on this episode of Talking Postgres (formerly Path To Citus Con) to share their experience on podcasting about Postgres. Is listening to a podcast the next best thing to being in the hallway track at a conference? Does it bring the community together? How beneficial has it been to have a parallel chat while recording live? What is the “sweet spot” for the number of guests to have per e...
Jul 12, 2024•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 17
It’s not a conference unless you can confer, right? POSETTE organizers Teresa Giacomini and Aaron Wislang join Claire Giordano on the Path To Citus Con* podcast to share backstage perspectives on the making of POSETTE: An Event for Postgres. How do you feel about captions: love or hate? Should livestream talks be pre-recorded or presented live? Why rename from Citus Con to POSETTE? Where did the inspiration for POSETTE come from? And can the hallway track at a conference actually be fun—if it is...
Jun 21, 2024•1 hr 35 min•Ep. 16
Did you know that sometimes the fastest way of doing something is not having to do it at all? In this episode of Path To Citus Con*, the podcast for developers who love Postgres, Michael Christofides joins Claire Giordano to chat about his journey to explaining explain (or should we say EXPLAIN!?) Michael shared his origin story as a mathematician and his first experience with Postgres before walking us through co-founding a Postgres company and now co-hosting a podcast. Like many in the Postgre...
May 03, 2024•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 15
You have to find what works for you and Chris Ellis has never been the kind of person that could go and sit in a library—for Chris, the most productive Postgres place is in a coffee shop. In this episode of the Path To Citus Con* podcast for developers who love Postgres, Chris Ellis joined Claire and Pino to chat about his path to becoming more (and more) expert at using PostgreSQL. Curiosity may have killed the cat but it’s taken Chris places, beginning as a 5 year old playing with QBASIC. Chri...
Apr 05, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 14
Everywhere you look, people are talking about AI. From Copilot to ChatGPT to Postgres’s powerful AI capabilities (think: pgvector), AI is everywhere. In this episode of Path To Citus Con*, for developers who love Postgres, Arda Aytekin joined Claire and Pino to chat about spinning up on Postgres and AI. Arda shared his origin story in mechanical engineering and data science before walking us through vector databases, pgvector, and azure_ai. Arda is one of the creators of the azure_ai extension, ...
Mar 08, 2024•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 13
The best days are when things don’t go as planned. Derk van Veen joined Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia on this episode of Path To Citus Con* podcast for developers who love Postgres—to discuss his journey from Java developer to PostgreSQL specialist and DBA. From his first days with DB2 and Oracle, to his work with Postgres, Derk shared how he learned about databases. And how a very smart colleague would break the database on purpose, to give Derk the tough job of fixing it. Another topic: w...
Feb 09, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 12
No one likes benchmarking. But it can be one of the highest impact things you do. Jelte Fennema-Nio and Marco Slot joined Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia on this episode of Path To Citus Con* podcast for developers who love Postgres—to discuss their journeys into performance benchmarking. And how it can change the course of your career. Do you need to find bottlenecks in your Postgres? Do you want to build skills with database benchmarks? There are many lovely benchmarking tools in the Postgr...
Jan 12, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 11
Do you monitor your Postgres error logs for gold? Lukas Fittl and Rob Treat join Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia on the Path To Citus Con* podcast for developers who love Postgres—to discuss their respective journeys into Postgres monitoring. Have you ever asked yourself: “Why is my query so slow?” Or had to figure out which query is slowing things down? Or why your database server is at 90% CPU? There are so many ways to monitor Postgres: pganalyze, pgMustard, pgBadger, pgDash, your cloud pr...
Dec 08, 2023•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 10
Is being lazy a good reason to learn SQL? Dimitri Fontaine and Vik Fearing join Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia on the Path To Citus Con* podcast for developers who love Postgres—to discuss whether every data problem can be (or should be) solved in SQL. Have you tried to solve all the Advent of Code puzzles with SQL? Or written a book for application developers about The Art of PostgreSQL? Or tried to solve a murder mystery by running SQL queries? Regardless of whether you pronounce SQL as “s...
Nov 03, 2023•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 9
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,...
Oct 13, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 8
The geospatial world of Postgres is so much more than mapping. Paul Ramsey and Regina Obe join Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia to explore the "where" on Path To Citus Con*, the podcast for developers who love Postgres. What are some of the unexpected use cases for PostGIS, one of the most popular extensions to Postgres? How have Large Language Models helped in the geospatial world? Can you really model almost anything with pgRouting? “Where” is the universal foreign key. They talk about commu...
Sep 08, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 7
Drop the fear, not the tables. Chelsea Dole and Floor Drees join Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia to explore the app developer perspective on Path To Citus Con*, the podcast for developers who love Postgres. If you’re an app developer, you’re probably already using Postgres. Now what? What do you need to know? Are databases your best friend or your worst enemy? They talk about the steps to becoming more Postgres-savvy. Should you go depth-first or breadth-first in order to learn more about the...
Aug 11, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 6
Everyone learns differently. Grant Fritchey and Ryan Booz , database advocates at Redgate focusing on PostgreSQL, talk with Path To Citus Con* co-hosts Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia to explore the learning resources available to developers and users in all the corners of the PostgreSQL world. What drives you to learn: need or curiosity? What can podcasts teach us while we bike to work? Are conference talks good for growing skills, or are they better for networking? What about books? And do ...
Jul 14, 2023•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 5
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 b...
Jul 06, 2023•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 4
Álvaro Herrera, and Boriss Mejías , both longtime members of the Postgres developer community, explore the value of giving conference talks—as well as the work involved, the time it takes, and the many different types of conference talks, including presentations about about failure and things that have gone wrong. In this episode of Path To Citus Con*, Claire and Pino guide the conversation on questions like: Should you add humor to your talks? How does your personality—introvert or extrovert—af...
Jul 06, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 3
Join Claire and Pino as they talk with Citus and Postgres open source team members to explore how to get Postgres ready for the next 100 million users. What will future Postgres users look like? How will the Postgres development process evolve with more users? What are the common challenges faced by Postgres users? Citus open source team members Abdullah Ustuner and Burak Yucesoy are joined by Postgres open source teammates Melanie Plageman and Samay Sharma—and co-hosts Claire Giordano and Pino ...
Jul 03, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 2
Simon 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 Post...
Jun 29, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 1
