Michael: Hello and welcome to Postgres.FM, a weekly show about
all things PostgreSQL.
I am Michael, founder of pgMustard.
This is my cohost Nikolay, founder of Postgres.AI.
Hey Nikolay, how's it going?
Nikolay: Hi Michael, everything is all right.
How are you?
Michael: I'm good, thank you.
So this week it was my choice and I have picked the topic of
Postgres online communities partly because when I was new to
Postgres, I would have loved this kind of conversation as to if
I've got a question, if I've got like a deeply technical question
where should I post it or how should I post it, there's so many
online forums communities social media sites that. I found it
quite daunting to kind of know where were people what kind of
things worked well in different places. That kind of thing. So
I thought I'd bring that and see and I know we're kind of on
Slightly different social networks or where we tend to spend
more of our time. So I'd be really interested in your views on
why you like the ones that you like that kind of thing as well.
Nikolay: Yeah, well first of all we exclude offline communities,
right?
Yeah, and for example long ago in Russia.
I was organizing meetups but then we had a rise in 2014 and 2015,
2016, and then I saw decline.
And I saw decline in the Bay Area where I moved around the same
time before that.
So I was visiting both places and I saw decline of this kind
of offline communities on both parts of the world and I still
don't understand why because at the same time front-enders had
huge meetups and at some point I decided to move fully online
all my attention and focus and activities you know last time
I stopped going to conferences.
So I like online, because online you can communicate asynchronously.
This is the key, right?
You can think and follow up and so on, And you can do it with
your convenience.
Of course, we lack a lot of stuff online, but for our work online
is great because you can share code, pictures, everything, discussing.
Actually, some online formats are not like that.
For example, podcast.
And I know we have our own small community of permanent listeners
and I'm thankful to the fact it's growing.
It's really good to hear feedback, to see feedback, to see from
customers mentioning that they constantly Listen to our podcast.
That's great.
It feels great.
But I still I agree with you.
It's like fragmented a lot of various places Right.
There's no there's no big central place.
There are quite big places, right, but there's no single...
Michael: Well, maybe we should start there, because on the...
I thought I'd go to the PostgreSQL.org site, and there's a...
1 of the top headers is community, and that links to mailing
lists...
Nikolay: Like a single community, right?
Michael: I guess so, yeah.
I think it's just community with a Y.
Yeah, so 1 community.
But it links to mailing lists, which I think probably would count
as the big hub.
Like if you want to say that like the official online community
of Postgres is probably the mailing lists.
Nikolay: Yeah mailing lists and IRC.
Michael: I don't remember what's
the other 1.
Nikolay: IRC is like, ooh.
And I know they say community like single, single community but
I don't feel I belong to this community.
We discussed it a few times in the past.
I think there is a bigger community and how I see it, it's different
from the definition of this so-called official community, right?
So but you say communities, so many, many of them, right?
I see, I'm closer to you in this understanding.
So there are many groups and they are interconnected.
And the single community, it's like, it's good there is such
concept, but it's against open-source idea.
Because open-source idea, there should be many, many, many, many,
many things around, right?
So, mailing list I don't like.
IRC I don't almost touch.
It means this also like this is just form, but there is also
content deviation, right?
And there are many other places where people live.
And I remember times, now it's much less, but I remember times
when something was discussed somewhere and always some people
obviously feeling belonging to the main community, they started
saying, oh, it's not the right place to discuss things.
You should go to mailing list.
My reaction is...
Yeah.
Obviously if I react as I want to react you will cut this out.
So I won't react publicly but I guess our listeners can guess
my reaction.
If I want to be on Twitter or on Telegram or Slack, I want to
be there.
That's it.
Michael: I guess it's a bit about like development processes.
So when I've, I, I've got a background of being a product manager
and part of your job as being a product manager is listening
to your customers, listening to what people think of your software.
And you can encourage them to use the official forums, maybe
your product set has an official way of giving you feedback.
But if you want the truth of what people really think of your
software, you need to make sure you're also on social media and
looking at mentions of your brand wherever people are talking
about it, not just via your official thing.
So I think I've seen some of those conversations and I understand
what probably people, whether they say it in a nice way or not,
what they're probably trying to say is if you want the maximum
chance of your feedback being listened to constructively and
actually some improvements coming off the back of it, you're
best off reporting it in the official channels, like the official
places.
But from the flip side, I've definitely seen a lot of people
that have got very high influence in the Postgres development
circles hanging out on Twitter, in IRC, in like on LinkedIn,
wherever people are talking about Postgres, you know, their product,
and doing that product management kind of role of listening to
what issues people are having, listening to what suggestions
people have.
So while some in the community or communities might encourage
the more constructive places to have that conversation, there
are also people listening and interacting in the, everywhere
else as well.
So I can see both sides.
Nikolay: Yeah, but there are no Postgres managers in this open-source
project.
Yeah, so if some hacker listens to some in some place and just
picks up the idea that's great.
Michael: Exactly.
Nikolay: Yeah, but it's It's like just random, right?
Michael: Well, I think random's a bit, well yeah, I see what
you mean.
It relies a lot on those individual hackers, but that's Postgres
development.
Postgres development, there's no roadmap.
There's no, like, We all rely on individual hackers to do various
things.
Nikolay: Yeah.
Yeah, and for matters I don't like email.
I don't like IRC So what if I prefer for example Twitter and
I keep calling it Twitter and I don't like Elon Musk, you know
Like and so on.
Yeah, but I just it's just comfort zone and you mentioned
Blue Sky before we decided.
Michael: Oh, yeah.
Nikolay: So it's like Twitter.
Yeah.
Michael: So I thought I'd bring this conversation up now because
I saw a lot of people a lot of technical folks that I follow
on Twitter on Mastodon I'm quite I'm probably the most active
the place I read the most is on Mastodon because I'm seeing some
really good technical conversations happening there a lot of
those people are checking out Blue Sky this week last week it
feels like a not necessarily people are switching to it but a
lot of people seem to be checking it out this week so they've
gone from like I think something like 10 million users to about
15 million users in a week.
Overall.
Total.
So it's still tiny.
Nikolay: So who knows how many of them use Postgres?
Maybe just a few.
Michael: What all I mean is more that like it's still tiny.
I didn't want this conversation to be about that.
But I thought, oh, it's actually a good time to discuss where
are the good conversations happening around post because if you
want to keep in the loop of what's happening are you best off
having profiles like in which ones which site should you be checking
like these are the kind of questions I had at the beginning and
kind of just had to figure it all out myself.
Nikolay: Yeah I think a lot of good conversations are happening
on both Twitter and LinkedIn.
It's just there is a critical mass there and I just feel very
comfortable discussing something on Twitter.
And I know many, many, many hackers also and just very experienced
users, not only from this Postgres community, like from Capital
C, but also from like back-end engineering in general, with good
experience of Postgres and good problems they observe.
They are there and just sharing sometimes ideas.
It's super, like, I feel really comfortable just on Twitter.
And I know Slack is huge.
It's an official, right?
But it's Slack, I think, like, how many, more than 10,000 people
there just for Postgres and special Slack space, right?
And work space, how is it called?
And yeah, many, many discussions and troubleshooting sessions
are happening right there.
I think it's already kind of a good alternative to IRC.
Michael: Yeah,
I would say so I have I definitely am more positive
about the mailing lists and IRC than you are.
I do find email really helpful and I still think it's incredible
the quality of support you can get on both of those.
So as a user, not necessarily as like a, so as a hacker, you
have to use the mailing list, like it's the the way of communicating.
But the other mailing lists, the non-hackers ones, like general,
performance, a few others, I find it amazing that you can email
the performance mailing list and probably within a day, maybe
within a few days, you're hearing back from very, very experienced
Postgres hackers about your specific performance question and
it helps if you've done some background and given them really
good information to go on.
But even the people that don't do that get great advice or at
least encouraged to find out the things they need to be able
to be helped.
Which is unbelievable.
When you consider what you...
That's free support.
I think that's incredible.
And then IRC is a similar standard it's not threaded I love the
emails threaded and asynchronous IRC is like the opposite It's
not threaded and it's very very synchronous
Nikolay: Mm-hmm
Michael: So I actually hadn't I've when I first joined Postgres
because of I suspect this community site I spent quite a lot
of time logged into IRC, you know Watching the conversations
as they were happening and asking the odd question myself and
I did learn a lot there are some extremely experienced people
on that that are still very active and still help people but
to give you some numbers there's about 800 people live in the
PostgreSQL IRC channel.
Nikolay: How many people?
Michael: 800 or 783 right this minute and There's 24,000 in
the PostgreSQL Slack, the Postgres team Slack
Nikolay: I'm checking Russian speaking Postgres Telegram and
it has more than 13,000 members right now and more than 5,000
online.
But quality of discussions there, I cannot stay there for more
than 10 seconds because it's like...
Michael: As in is it beginner level questions?
Nikolay: It's very beginner a lot.
Like, like it's like huge wave of beginners.
And they have sometimes emotional discussions, not quality, like,
like sometimes collapsing, like clashing at each other and so
on.
And I can check also English speaking Telegram groups, which
have like a couple of thousand people, maybe less.
Yeah.
I actually, I created 1.
It's, it has more than 2000 members, 165 online, and there is
an alternative 1, almost 3000 members, 300 online.
And I don't know about the other, the second 1, but that 1 I
created, well, it also sometimes not good quality.
It's better quality than Russian speaking, but when people share
screenshots, with poor, like, you cannot understand what's written
there.
And it's terminal.
So like, it's just text, but there's screenshot on or even not
screenshot a picture made from phone.
Yeah, it's just, And I just wait, maybe someday we will create,
you know, GPT API has it, like we can understand automatically
and just, you know, transform to text from the picture.
Someday we will probably have such bot, you know.
Sometimes really interesting discussions, but often no.
Often no.
So I visit this group maybe like once a week.
Michael: Yeah.
So I personally avoid though, I find these huge channels that
are not threaded Impossible.
Nikolay: Well telegram was like kind of threaded you can it's
not it's not convenient.
It's not like in Slack, right?
Michael: In Slack, it's great that I actually find the Postgres
Slack, even though it's 24,000 members, there's probably only
about, at least in the general channel, there's probably only
5 or 6 new conversations per day.
And people have gotten into a really good habit of replying to
those in threads.
So if you're interested in a thread, you can post in it or you
can get notified of new replies.
Most people are familiar with how Slack works.
But it means that if you're not interested in a part of a conversation,
you can not follow it.
Whereas in Telegram, or if you're in 1 of these non threaded
environments You can't avoid it.
You could all you can do is log out for a while, you know You
know, just not check it for a while scroll for a while And so
I yeah, I find that is quite difficult But as a imagine you're
Nikolay: a sample email, right?
Well email has topics.
I mean like there are threats obviously, right?
But yeah, but sometimes there's huge discussion and it's hard
to To there should be some sub threads right some tree But there
is no such thing there
Michael: Yeah, yeah So yeah, so I'm definitely pros and cons
But it's really I think it's good that there are places that
beginners can go to ask questions and get help.
It's remarkable that people are willing to help them, but I've
got a huge amount of respect for the people that do have the
patience for those conversations.
Nikolay: I agree.
I see people with huge experience.
I know those people and they're still there like dealing with
this storm of new people.
We're asking, well, it's just, you know, like some people enjoy
it helping others and I can understand, I can relate.
I did it also in the past, on Stack Overflow, for example, right?
Another place where...
Michael: Another great place.
Nikolay: Another additional community, right?
And if you just like helping people, it's great.
Yeah, there is critical mass for sure.
And yeah, there are sometimes good discussions even if there
are many many many many new users
Michael: yeah I actually think I wanted to give Stack Overflow
or at least Stack Exchange there's a dba.stackexchange.com as well
it's great and Reddit I think I want to put in a similar category
because I think they surface answers quite well.
So they're quite good at showing up in search results.
So if people are using a search engine to ask their basic beginner
question, there's a decent chance they'll come across a Stack Overflow
post or a Reddit post increasingly that has a good discussion
already on the topic.
And they maybe then don't have to ask the exact same question
again via Telegram or Slack, which don't have as good search,
or at least they don't have long histories.
Well, actually, maybe Telegram does, but people don't seem to
use it.
Nikolay: Yeah, you know, I'm checking Telegram right now.
And actually, last many days, I don't see these pictures of console
made on phone and we're quite good discussions and I see people
use threads.
Telegram has like kind of virtual threads it's still like flat
but you can open specific discussion if people use reply you
can see only like part of it kind of thread but but not like
visually it's not there right so yeah and I agree with you on
Stack Overflow points.
I cannot agree on Reddit, maybe I just have not a lot of experience
hanging out there.
What about Hacker News?
Michael: Just to quickly, oh yeah, let's get to Hacker News.
I think Reddit is surprisingly good.
Like I think it's the PostgreSQL Reddit.
I'm not talking about Reddit generally, but the PostgreSQL subreddit
specifically.
There must be some people, and I've set this up recently as well,
that subscribe to the RSS feed of new posts to Reddit.
Again there's probably only something in the region of 5 to 10
new posts per day to the Reddit and some of that is people sharing
blog posts and you know promoting things that they've written
or they've found good posts from other people.
But a lot of it is beginner level questions and there are some
people again some of the same people I'll give definitely people
like I see depression pretty much all of these helping people
out and I that guy has such good patience and so Helpful to people
but people like Sean Thomas in the Discord, there's a Discord
as well that has a very similar beginner friendly vibe.
David Johnson, I'm sure there's tons of people that we could
give shoutouts out to, but even on the Reddit people are replying
same day often within an hour of the post with very helpful stuff.
So it's surprisingly synchronous for an asynchronous channel,
a bit like the email thread, a bit like the mailing list, and
a bit like Stack Overflow.
You know, you can get an answer really quickly for something
that's designed to be asynchronous.
And then I think they're doing a better and better job of surfacing
those questions to people asking the same via Google.
So if you're asking the same question someone asked 2 years ago,
there's a really good chance you'll still find it by the Reddit.
Whereas I don't think that's true.
Like on Slack, for example, the history is invisible after a
certain number of messages.
Nikolay: 30 days if it's not paid, of course, for 23,000 people
it's not paid.
Because it would cost something.
Michael: To give you an idea of volume, in terms of just numbers,
there's 47,000 people that have joined the PostgreSQL subreddit.
47,000!
Nikolay: Over many years, right?
Michael: Over many years, yeah.
Nikolay: Well, it's super easy to join there, because
it's not like in Slack, you need to pass through some gateways.
There is just 1 button, follow it, that's it.
Michael: The Slack 1 is not necessarily easy to find the invitation
link so I'll post that in the show notes.
Nikolay: Yeah, yeah.
And what about, again, what about Hacker News and what about
maybe Meta threads or some new stuff, some new places?
Michael: Well, I actually don't even have an I don't have an
account on Metas threads I saw a couple
Nikolay: of Postgres folks there, but not active.
I think it's not for Postgres yet And who knows what there are
many discussions there and they push all the time notifying through
Instagram or maybe through Facebook I don't know I use Instagram
for a family picture so I see notifications from thread about
different topics not about Postgres yet
Michael: We're probably the wrong generation for that, but I
definitely only use Instagram for personal stuff rather than
for professional things.
Nikolay: What about Hacker News?
It's not a social network, it's just a single place with random
topics.
Postgres is on the front page, Postgres-related topics are very
often on the front page.
Michael: I think Hacker News is a good place for seeing things
that are happening in the tech space in general, but if you relied
only on Hacker News for your news around Postgres, I think you'd
be missing out on a bunch.
I think only certain types of topics do well.
They have to be, I don't know quite how to define what it is.
It seems to be a certain depth of technical article does really
well on there, but not too niche.
And also, I think there's maybe like a dev, it's very dev focused
rather than DBA, like it feels very back end or full stack developer
crowd.
And There's
Nikolay: many more of such people around, right?
So in general, number of back-end engineers is much, many more
than like database engineers.
For example,
Michael: There can be extremely good conversation.
I know it gets a bad reputation for the quality of conversation
on this in some circles, but sometimes I come across really good
conversations there.
And sometimes it's people that really know their stuff from the
database world popping into Hacker News to help, you know, to
answer some questions or to comment on some things.
Nikolay: Yeah, and this is a place where you intersect with other
very different communities.
Because you can see people who hate Postgres, they come in to
comment.
Unlike, I think they don't go to Postgres Slack to comment how
they hate Postgres, right?
That's a good point.
They are on Hacker News.
Even on Reddit, if you don't like, you don't follow, so you don't
participate.
But on Hacker News, if some topic Postgres related is on front
page.
Obviously some people will comment with some hate speech a little
bit, but not often, not often.
But in general, obviously, like people love Postgres in general.
This is for true, like for Sure.
But sometimes there are useful grains in this, not hateful speech,
but you know, like skepticism.
And sometimes you hear people struggle with MVCC design and bloat
or something.
They just like complain.
And these people are quite good, educated and good engineers.
So it's like, Hacker News is a place where you can hear people
struggling with some issues Postgres still has.
And this cannot be ignored, right?
So this is a place where people express in very technical, very
good technical form, what's the problem.
Michael: Yeah, and I would add Twitter to that as well as a place
where you
Nikolay: can get that.
Michael: Intersection.
Exactly.
Nikolay: LinkedIn, LinkedIn as well.
LinkedIn.
Michael: Yes, Although I've seen less of it on LinkedIn for some
reason.
I don't see that much negativity about Postgres on LinkedIn for
some reason.
Maybe just the people I'm connected to.
Nikolay: Maybe LinkedIn just deprioritize negative stuff and
just Prioritize positive stuff right?
People just congratulate with every step in career all the time.
This is what LinkedIn is, right?
What a great post.
Everything's so good.
This is just corporate style, you know
Michael: But true, it is more positive stuff, isn't it?
That is a good point
Nikolay: yeah, but I like to find problems and think about them,
so I
Michael: Think Most of these communities are not great for self-promotion,
but LinkedIn is 1 where promoting your own stuff is encouraged
and is very much part of the culture.
So I actually think that might be worth knowing.
If you're looking to be able to promote your own blog posts or
your own videos and things, that is a
Nikolay: great way to do that.
To build a reputation as an expert, LinkedIn I think is a good
way to gather attention.
Yeah, true.
Share ideas, collect feedback.
But I would expect true feedback not on LinkedIn.
On Twitter maybe.
Because on LinkedIn, I don't know.
Maybe just like some overall impression.
But yeah, what else?
There are sometimes unexpected communities.
I mean, discussions.
For example, remember we discussed limitations of ANALYZE single-threaded
and how to run it multiple threads and I created how to it's
still, this merge request on GitLab is still not merged.
Right, because suddenly we started having discussions there.
And a couple of folks chimed in and started sharing experiences.
It's interesting because new things appeared and I explored new
things.
For example, this post-upgrade ANALYZE of partition tables turned
out neither vacuumdb nor autovacuum take care about root partition
tables.
They don't update statistics at all.
If you run it manually, it's updated both for individual partitions
and main, like, root table.
But vacuumdb doesn't do it, and it means post-upgrade.
If you do need the statistics, you need to, additionally to vacuumdb,
you need additional single-threaded ANALYZE on partitioned tables.
It's kind of interesting, right?
And there's no ANALYZE only, so if you run on partitioned tables,
it will scan also partitions.
So it's like some rabbit hole I didn't expect at all.
And these discussions are happening still in Merge Request, you
know?
And they are threaded.
It's like commenting particular piece of my write-up, it's definitely
threaded on GitHub and on GitLab.
It's very convenient.
Michael: Yeah, it doesn't surprise me that that is happening
there because it's great for sharing code and for being specific
and you can write a really long if you if your comment is best
communicated as a very long piece of writing that's easy on Twitter
that's trickier is You don't have code formatting and there's
like a few subtleties of that being much easier to communicate
clearly on some of these other forums.
Nikolay: Yeah, so what I think is to get all my, I have almost
100 how-tos written like started a year ago and then I had a
marathon lasting 3 months or so.
So I'm thinking to create a book, online free book, constantly
growing on GitHub, GitLab, maybe on both and having community
around it.
Some small community, you know, people who want to have good
run books, how to analyze at full speed, for example.
vacuumdb and like number of cores, what to think about, and so
on.
This is simple task at first glance, but turned out not so simple.
Yeah, things not to forget.
And yeah, I just need to structure these recipes and I'm very
curious what people think.
Let's test it.
Let's test if we have community.
I ask people who listen to this, until this point, please comment
somewhere.
If you listen on YouTube, you know there is comment section below,
as always people say.
But if it's broadcast, just Twitter or...
Yeah, I use Twitter, so you can just comment there, because we
have Postgres.FM account on Twitter right
Michael: well yeah but if anybody else was thinking of starting
a podcast around this I originally I think if you'd asked me
in week 1, would I recommend doing it to YouTube as well?
I wouldn't have been that fussed, I would have thought it's not
that big a deal, most people are going to listen to your podcast
via the audio stream, so it doesn't matter that much, but we
would have missed out on so many comments it's the the barrier
to leaving somebody some feedback via a podcast about an audio
only podcast it's hassle you have to look it up or you have to
write a review.
It's always tricky.
It's always a little bit of extra work.
The barrier to writing a comment when you're watching a video
on YouTube is so low that we get the vast majority, even though
most of our listeners don't listen on YouTube, the vast majority
of our feedback and comments come on YouTube.
Yeah, so, yeah.
Nikolay: My ask is to go to Postgres.tv it will redirect to YouTube
channel where we also publish Postgres.FM podcast and under this
episode please comment if you think it's a good idea.
Because I'm thinking for some time and I just need understanding
that it will be useful for other folks because I'm not doing
for myself.
For myself I already wrote a lot of stuff but I want to publish
for free and see if this resonates and is actually useful.
It's like a bunch of how-tos.
Michael: I don't know if I have to leave a comment on YouTube
but I would find that useful.
Nikolay: Good.
Plus 1.
Michael: Yeah, plus 1.
I think, and maybe I have a bias here but I've seen places kind
of try to encourage community involvement before and it's been
a list like sometimes the way that you have These discus things
or you have like I think There's a site I like by the team at
Ongress called postgresqlco.nf, and that has a whole section
for comments.
But either nobody does, or the quality of the comments are dubious,
so maybe some kind of, I don't know how you would encourage comments
or, and also moderate them for quality and things.
It's a tricky
Nikolay: topic.
Our website, Postgres.AI website and blog section doesn't have
comments.
There is a request and there is demand for comments people ask
from time to time.
My idea is discourse and all the approach to comments doesn't
work.
This morning I wanted, you know, we discussed topic about query
ID and auto_explain and the fact that on Aurora it didn't work
and then it turned out that it was Postgres 15.
And I saw a blog post on AWS blog and there are a couple of comments
there Asking why it doesn't work and I wanted to leave a comment
sharing my finding which I think thank you actually comes from
you That it starts starts working only since Pocket 16.
I spent 20 minutes, asynchronously, trying to register there
and create AWS Builder account.
I have Builder account, but they say it's already blocked.
I just created it.
Why is it blocked?
For violation of something.
So these comments don't work, and also I feel the urge to create
something new here, but I don't know what.
We just discussed that there are sometimes comments in merge
requests or pull requests, and they are very contextual, right?
They belong to some part of the text or the code.
And what if you publish an article, normal thing is, I think
you also have it, source code is already published on GitHub,
for example, right?
Sometimes even there is an edit button to propose correction
of typo.
Also, not many people do it, right?
But what if the discussion would be coming from GitHub or something
and related to code?
I don't know.
It's the job of GitLab to provide some snippet so I could embed
into my website and have a discussion maybe leading to some corrections
or additions to the text and improving it.
So this is something I'm thinking, but it doesn't exist yet.
GitHub doesn't provide it, GitLab doesn't provide it.
Maybe it's a good idea for them to consider, for those who keep
Macdown, for example, there on GitHub or GitLab, and then it's
published to like in form of blog post, right?
Because if you have Discos, it's disconnected from everything.
Well, I don't know.
On depesz.com, comments work, right?
Michael: Yeah, same on my blog.
Nikolay: Oh, great, great.
What do you use for...
Michael: I use Squarespace for that blog, yeah.
But it works.
But I like having comments enabled but I also like to be able
to moderate them.
If someone leaves a spam link and then needs to delete it.
So they are important, and I find them really, I actually find
them quite energizing.
Most comments are really positive, like some people just saying
thank you for writing a post that's helped them.
So I feel like that's quite nice, and it's also quite nice for
other people to then read that it helped us others, you know,
I think that's quite almost like makes you feel like other people
have actually come across the same issues as you, that kind of
thing, you know, community stuff.
Nikolay: Yeah, so anyway, like folks who listen to us, please
leave a comment on YouTube and say if you think it's a good idea
to have my how-tos published in a different form, in the form
of book, online book.
And also just say simple words if you consider this podcast useful.
We need it.
Right?
Michael: Do you know, actually, something I didn't even think
to bring up was I've seen both of us have done it But I've seen
you have quite a lot of success with these polls on certain social
media.
Nikolay: Oh yeah, on Twitter.
It works on Twitter very well.
Michael: And I think LinkedIn quite well as well.
People are way more likely to be able to answer a poll than to
answer a question on some of these sites.
And it can be really helpful.
I know it's biased.
Nikolay: I like polls.
Yeah, well, it always depends on, like, you can influence it,
choosing proper language and options you can influence.
But I mostly consider it more like fun, but sometimes good insight.
Michael: Yeah, that's cool.
But the bias thing, I actually didn't mean as much the wording
which can definitely sway survey design and stuff is a whole
another topic but I actually meant bias because Who does it reach
like it reaches your followers and then depends a lot on who
likes it retweets it that kind of thing
Nikolay: Of course
Michael: as to who it's even reaching So for example, if you
with your followers asking a question about Postgres versus
MySQL it would unlikely be a representative poll.
Nikolay: It is so.
But this is my small world and I like it and I'm curious what
people around my Twitter account think.
This is what I'm most interested in.
I'm not interested in people who just like very far and like
MySQL users and like what do, what they think about pg_dump.
Although sometimes we have intersections as well.
And, quite often CEO of PlanetScale chimes in asking something
about Postgres, so it's interesting.
Michael: Which by the way, that's incredible, right?
That we can be having a conversation online and the CEO of PlanetScale...
Nikolay: Well I don't have such...
I don't have such...
How to say...
Perception.
So, CEO, so what?
It's good that...
I mean, it's good that I'm dealing with himself, not with his
assistant, because sometimes, you know, democracy works in the
US, for example, but I cannot reach the director of my daughter's
elementary school because she sends assistant to organize zoom
call and doesn't respond to emails for 2 weeks.
Yeah, well, I just appreciate when any level of manager, they
just go and talk directly.
It's great.
Michael: And listen to users.
Yeah, Whether or not it's listening is another question I guess.
Actually before we wrap up I had a couple of others just quick,
they're not really communities but I realized when you mentioned
Hacker News it was kind of like a little bit of staying in touch
with what's happening And I realized I actually rely on non-community.
Well, I guess one's relatively community-driven, which is
Planet PostgreSQL, which is a blogging syndication platform.
That's kind of a community site in a way.
Lots of people from non-official sources posting about Postgres.
And I find that an extremely helpful way of staying in the loop
of what people are thinking about what issues people are hitting
what products people are building that kind of thing and on a
similar vein Especially if you don't want to follow all of those
Postgres Weekly is a good newsletter for like what are the highlights
this week from the Postgres world
Nikolay: Yep.
Michael: Is there anything else in that kind of vein that
you'd point people to...
Nikolay: Well, I don't think newsletters are communities because
you don't have full-out discussion there.
But yeah, I agree, it's a good source of what's happening.
Michael: Yeah, true.
Any last advice or things for people?
Nikolay: Well, Thank you for all who are listening to us.
We will discuss, like, very interesting topics are coming, I
must say.
Stay tuned.
Yeah.
Michael: I like that.
I'm going to consider that a performance pun.
Nikolay: Stay, yeah, performance tuned as well
Michael: stay tuned yeah exactly
Nikolay: good
Michael: take care thanks a lot Nikolay