[CLAIRE] Welcome to Talking Postgres, the podcast for developers who love Postgres,
where we discuss the human side of databases, Postgres, and open source.
For regular listeners, I want to point out that this podcast has been renamed,
formerly called Path to Citus Con,
our new name is Talking Postgres, as of early July 2024.
I want to say thank you to the team at Microsoft for sponsoring this community conversation,
and I am your host, Claire Giordano, and today's topic is podcasting about Postgres.
It's a very meta topic today.
And I want to introduce our guest, Pino de Candia,
who is the former co-host of the Path to Citus Con podcast,
and he was the co-host for the first 14 episodes or so.
Pino is an engineering manager on the Azure Database for PostgreSQL team here at Microsoft,
and these days he's spending a lot of time working with the engineers on Gen AI and Postgres things.
Welcome, Pino.
[PINO] Thanks, Claire. Thanks for having me back on the show.
[CLAIRE] I'm so glad you're here for this meta conversation where we'll talk about podcasting about Postgres.
And I think we have to start with the fundamental question, which is,
why do we do this? And why does anyone listen?
And why do we do this live on Discord?
Do you want to help me answer those questions?
[PINO] Yes, yes. And I think there are several levels to this question, right?
At one level, there's a question of, like, as an organization, as a team, why do we do this?
Then there are personal motives. And as community members, why do we do this?
I think I'll start with the personal, because that's where I feel most comfortable.
I think podcasting about the human side of Postgres in particular,
it humanizes the software, the community, brings people, you know, puts a voice to people.
Of course, we also have the conference where you can see people on video.
And I find that that makes the community feel more intimate,
maybe a little bit less intimidating for, you know, if psychological safety is your thing.
And then it's just wonderful to get to know people, because part of the work we do,
or at least maybe what makes the work meaningful, is interacting with people.
So that would be where I would start off. I have more to say about it,
but maybe we'll go back and forth.
[CLAIRE] I got a note. I was trying to see if I could look it up really quickly,
but I'm not fast enough this morning.
But I got a note from somebody who is new to the Azure Database for PostgreSQL team,
and he had discovered the podcast and had listened to like six episodes back to back,
and just sent me a note of profuse thanks.
And I was kind of surprised because, you know, if this was a new hire into the Azure Database for PostgreSQL team,
you think he would be focused on spinning up on aspects of the Azure functionality, right?
Versus trying to understand the Postgres community and the people behind it and how things are done and how they got their start.
But he was learning a lot from these conversations about monitoring, about benchmarking,
about how the Postgres core team works and the Postgres release cycles work.
And anyway, it was kind of a cool feeling for me.
Like that day, I was like, "Okay, I feel good about doing this podcast. It's helping people."
And I had to write this blog post about the rename, and we'll talk about the rename in a little bit.
And in the blog post, I was trying to express what the value is for a listener in listening to the podcast.
And I'm going to go dig up what I said because I'm not sure I could say it better right now.
But it was something like, it's kind of, and I stole this a little bit from Bryan Cantrill,
but it was like, it's like you're eavesdropping in the hallway at a Postgres conference.
And there are some people who've been working in Postgres maybe longer than you, maybe in a different area than you.
They have different expertise than you, and you get to eavesdrop on their conversation and learn from their experiences.
And I think that's pretty cool. That's why I do it.
[PINO] I like that way of describing it.
I also think there's something about if you're ramping up on a project and you're only going to need to work on it,
say for two or four weeks, you're going to do something with it and then put it aside, move on to something else.
Then you might not need to touch it because it kind of works.
Then you'll study the technical aspects of the project.
You'll solve the problem you need to do to solve at that point in time.
But you might not invest in getting to know the community.
Whereas Postgres is the kind of tool, the kind of software that you can interact with a lot over the course of years, eventually.
And so I think it's worth making that investment, not just understanding it at a technical level,
but understanding meeting some of the people in the community, understanding some of the history.
And the podcast does that.
We don't do it in a – we haven't done it in a potentially maybe systematic way,
but you hear a lot about the past experiences of people, both their personal journeys,
and then little tidbits about what changed in Postgres, when and why.
So that's – yeah, that definitely aligns with what you just said about, you know,
why would someone feel like when they're ramping up on a managed Postgres service,
why would they learn about Postgres via this podcast?
[CLAIRE] I found the quote of what I ended up writing, and I got feedback from Boriss Mejías and Floor Drees
as I was trying to articulate, like, why? Why listen? Why care?
But I welcome anybody else's feedback who's listening to this later.
If they have a different perspective on why they listen to the podcast or what the value is to them,
feel free to pop into this Discord at aka.ms/open-source-discord.
Go to the Talking Postgres channel and, like, drop in why you think it's valuable,
because maybe I can articulate this better.
But what I wrote before was, "Listening to the Talking Postgres podcast is the next best thing
to being in the hallway at a Postgres conference, eavesdropping on other people's conversations,
and learning from the experiences of experts.
As Floor Drees says, it's as if you're sharing a coffee with them."
So there's the quote. The question is, could we do better? Could we do better?
[PINO] I love that quote, and I love that you're asking for feedback.
And one of the things I've seen you do over the course of the podcast is pull your contacts
in the community for advice on various aspects.
And I hope that others, whether they already know you or not, do chime in, send you a note,
give you some more feedback about why they like the podcast, what works well, what doesn't.
[CLAIRE] And then the other question you told me, one of the things people should know is we do not practice.
Most podcasters do not practice beforehand.
You want the conversation to be happening for the first time and not to be stale
and not to be rehearsed, because that makes it robotic and boring.
So anyway, we didn't practice, but you did say, "Claire, I want to make sure we talk about
why we record live on Discord. Why does it happen that way?"
So we should talk about that, right?
[PINO] That's right, because I actually wanted to, you know, I've heard you maybe say parts of this story,
but I like the story, and so I'd like to know where you got the inspiration.
And then we can talk about how that adds value.
[CLAIRE] Well, I used to work in the kernel group at Sun, and across the hall was where DTrace was created.
Down the hall is where ZFS was created. Solaris Zones was kind of around the corner.
I was an engineering manager. My team created Solaris Zones, among other things,
and we did a lot of other resource management work as well.
And so two of those people, Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, are now at Oxide Computer,
and they host the Oxide and Friends podcast, and I was listening to it back before it was on Discord.
It was still on Twitter Spaces, and they were trying to find a new home, new technology.
And that's right at the point when we were thinking of starting a podcast.
And so I was watching them with bated breath and messaging them and saying,
"Okay, what technologies and what platforms have you tried, and what are you going to decide on?"
And they picked Discord.
And then right around that same time, we were preparing for--was it year two of Citus Con?
I think it was. We wanted to do a pre-event, and that kind of allowed us to kind of combine these ideas
of using Discord for Citus Con as a virtual hallway track,
and then having a pre-event also on Discord for Citus Con year two,
and then potentially having that pre-event turn into a podcast, maybe, if it takes off.
So anyway, we ended up copying the Oxide and Friends playbook. That's the short answer.
[PINO] The first few episodes were a little bit of an experiment,
and both with the idea of podcasting and also the format.
What--and what I love about the Discord channel is that it's been very lively,
and people--it's the hallway track, and it feels right that we have this conversation,
we can have an interaction with folks that are on the channel as well.
People like to participate. Not everyone.
And you can also listen--you can listen to the recordings later.
But then those inputs have made it into our conversations very often.
[CLAIRE] Yeah, and into the show notes as well.
Like, people drop in links to books, podcasts, blogs, videos, resources, whatever.
And oftentimes that chatter that happens, that parallel text chat,
ends up influencing the show that we publish,
both in voice and also in the set of links that we share.
[PINO] It does feel more like an event, right? Doesn't it?
There's a little bit more excitement.
We wave hello to people, to familiar faces when we start the episode,
so that makes it more fun--that makes it fun.
[CLAIRE] I am--in working on Citus Con and POSETTE,
which I know we're here to talk about the podcast and not about those events,
but I've invited people to be keynote speakers for those events before,
and only one person has ever turned me down.
And I'm not going to name his name, but the reason he turned me down,
and I think that was in year two or year three or year one, I don't know,
they all blend together, but the reason he turned me down
is because he doesn't like doing virtual events.
He gets his energy from the audience.
And so I kind of feel the same way.
When we're here doing the podcast conversation,
it is super helpful to see the chat flying by and see what people are saying.
And it does--it gives you a little feeling of validation.
It gives you new ideas of questions to ask or things to say.
And, yeah, it gives me energy, certainly.
So I really like it.
We get a lot of variability in terms of the number of people that join
the virtual chat that happens.
I think a lot of times it depends on how good a job we did
making sure people knew about the live recording, right, in advance.
But it's quite fun.
So I think there's a link we can drop in there, too,
that you can use to subscribe to the future calendar of live recordings.
So it's like aka.ms/talkingpostgres-cal
And that subscribes you to the series.
And usually we've got the dates and times for the next six episodes all lined up.
So, anyway, hopefully that's useful to people.
[PINO] Can I just add, what I really love about the Discord is that the folks on it represent--
you know, it's different folks.
There's some regulars and then there's different folks for different episodes.
There's a range, and some have a ton of knowledge and experience in the Postgres space.
So they bring to our attention links, information, and then there's side conversations
that can go off in other directions, folks, points of interest.
So there's really something here for everyone.
[CLAIRE] Okay, so why do we do the rename? Do you want to talk about that briefly?
It's an important moment, I think.
[PINO] Yes, yes, yes, absolutely.
And there's been some excitement about that.
Please, please.
So, yeah, please go ahead. I'd like you to tell the story.
[CLAIRE] Oh, okay. Well, I'll do my best.
I can remember being in New York City last September.
We've been talking about renaming this podcast since September.
Or maybe it was early October.
And I was there for PGConf New York City.
I was the speaker, and there were a bunch of my teammates there.
Also speakers. My company was a sponsor, so Microsoft had a table.
And I was walking to a dinner.
And I got to the dinner.
It was at this kind of a hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant.
I got lost once or twice on the way there, but I finally made it.
But I was later than everyone else.
And it seemed like I was ganged up on.
Like, people were like, "Hey, Claire, the podcast is great, but you've really got to rename it.
It's not about Citus Con. Why do you call it Path to Citus Con?"
Every single month, you bring on Postgres people, and you talk about Postgres things.
You know, it should have Postgres in the name.
And so that was kind of the point at which I realized, "Okay, I'm not going to be able to resist this anymore."
So some people think that we renamed the podcast because the previous virtual Citus Con event was renamed to POSETTE.
Right?
So what was Citus Con: An Event for Postgres, was renamed to POSETTE: An Event for Postgres.
But the podcast has kind of become its own thing.
It has forked off from its original role as a pre-event for Citus Con.
It's become a monthly podcast.
It really has nothing to do with POSETTE, previously Citus Con.
So the real reason to rename it is just because the name was misleading.
Right?
It was no longer a Path to Citus Con.
It really was about Postgres.
And we needed to get Postgres in the name.
We went through, I'm trying to think, I'm trying to picture the list, a very long list of possibilities.
Probably a couple of pages long.
I don't know, 75?
It was a long list.
And we ended up coming down to like 10 finalists and then 5 finalists.
Anyway, eventually landed on Talking Postgres and I'm thrilled with it.
I got feedback from a friend saying he thought it was a perfect name.
I don't know if any name is perfect, but I'll take the compliment.
Other people have just said it's just a lot more fitting.
It makes more sense.
I also hope it helps people discover it.
[PINO] And I'll say I always thought that the taglines, the podcast for developers who love Postgres, the human side of Postgres,
fit the podcast better than the main title.
And there's a question of timing there.
And maybe there's an interesting experience there about how do you start a podcast and what do you learn as you go.
Because since this did start as a pre-event for the conference, it made sense at the time to name it Path to Citus Con.
And then once you've done that and we had not initially planned to keep the podcast running past the conference,
when we did, there was a question of, well, changing the name, that can create complications.
So there wasn't a right time initially to rename.
Right?
You have to get some momentum.
You have to get some attention around the podcast.
So it's appropriate that we waited.
And then -- and also we had this -- I think the podcast had to take shape.
And we had to find our footing.
What was it really going to be about?
And we'll talk through -- I think it will come up in this episode.
We'll talk through how we felt about the podcast and the kinds of things that we asked and the kinds of how we let the conversation flow.
So that's why I think it took a while to change the name.
And then changing the name is not easy either.
It takes some marketing and there's some effort behind the scenes by you, the producers.
So, yeah.
[CLAIRE] Well, we kind of had a window where we might have been able to get the rename to happen in, say, April.
And then after that, May and June, our team also works on POSETTE: An Event for Postgres.
And so we were completely distracted and all hands on deck to produce POSETTE and make it happen.
And so that's why the rename ended up, instead of happening in that kind of March/April time frame, happened in early July.
But, yeah, now it's happened.
And I should point out that the URL is now different as well.
So you can just go to TalkingPostgres.com.
So we have a domain for all the past episodes if people want to go catch up on them.
And there's a subscribe tab there that makes it easy to subscribe.
So hopefully that will make it more discoverable as well for people who are just kind of searching on the Internet for podcasts about Postgres.
I think the only other story that I think is kind of interesting is Path to Citus Con, which really does roll off the tongue.
It's four words, but it's so easy to say.
It was actually inspired by a series of user group presentations that were done in 2020, organized by Floor Drees, I think,
and José Miguel Parella, who I know from Microsoft, was one of the speakers.
And this series of user group meetings was called Path to FOSDEM.
And I was just inspired by that.
I thought it was really cool.
It happened in January, and it was in different cities in Europe, kind of for people as they were on their path to FOSDEM.
And FOSDEM, as you know, is like this huge, amazing gathering of thousands upon thousands of developers from all over the world
that happens each year in the beginning of the year in the cold of winter in Brussels, Belgium, at the Université Libre de Bruxelles.
Did I say that right? I don't know.
Somebody who speaks French better than me can correct me.
And so Path to FOSDEM was the original inspiration.
And I just wanted to put that out there to record it before I forget so that we have that moment captured.
[PINO] Absolutely. And Claire, you've been to FOSDEM?
[CLAIRE] Yes. Yes. Many times.
I've been a speaker in the Postgres Dev Room a couple of times.
And I think FOSDEM is fun, but it's also a challenging event to go to for the first time.
Like, I remember not... It's very unstructured.
And so you really have to have a plan of where you want to be and when.
And, you know, sometimes it's on a college campus, and sometimes it's a 15-minute walk from one building to the other.
And then there might be long lines to get into the room that you want to get into.
And so you can't necessarily plan on just getting in to that session.
Maybe you have to also attend the session before, or you'll never get a seat.
So it takes some planning. It takes some know-how to really get the most out of the event. But it's fun.
[PINO] Sounds like it's very exciting and you have to really put the energy in.
Maybe they... Right. It's a big event, isn't it?
[CLAIRE] Yes. Yes. And bring your winter down coat, too.
And maybe your snow boots, depending on the weather.
So since we're talking about podcasting about Postgres today, I was wondering if...
Unless you have more questions about the rename, I was wondering if we could reflect back on the 16 episodes that we've had so far.
And then I also want to talk a little bit about other podcasts, because we are not the only game in town.
There are other interesting podcasts about Postgres. But first, I thought we could do this reflection.
Are you game to do that, Pino, still?
[PINO] Let's do that, please.
[CLAIRE] OK. So we'll find out if you did your homework or not, because we divvied these up.
So I took about half the episodes and you took about half the episodes, right?
[PINO] That's right.
[CLAIRE] All right. So let's start at the beginning. Episode one.
And this was, I think, the very end of March in 2023.
This was one of those pre-events for last year's Citus Con.
And we had the two keynote speakers as our guests.
So Simon Willison and Marco Slat.
And the topic was "Working in Public."
And I think some of the takeaways that I remember most from that was this concept of doing something for future you.
And these Simon and Marco were not the only people to talk about, you know, future you.
That is a motivation. That is a term that lots of people use these days.
But it really captured at least my mind as a motivation for why I might do something today.
I was in a meeting with someone the other day and I was talking about doing a retrospective
and reflecting on how things went wrong in a particular project and what we can do better next time.
And there was this question of, "Is it really worth our time?"
And I think the answer is that, yeah, I want to be nice to future Claire so that I don't have to go through this pain again.
And if I can learn something from this and do it better, avoid the pain in the future, then that's a good thing.
[PINO] That also stuck with me. And I'll say that I have actually told my children about future you.
I use that as a motivation to get -- yeah, I use that as a motivation to explain to the children,
"Look, think about --" in lots of different situations, not only necessarily preserving work, but just kids' behavior.
You know, how will staying up late today, tonight, affect how you're going to feel tomorrow, for example?
But it's a wonderful idea.
And Simon, especially Simon, reflected on how working in public and jotting and making notes,
which Simon does regular engineering notes on a regular basis, is something that is just --
first it's become a force of habit, and then it's just an incremental effort on the kind of prep he needs to do anyway.
And then it is useful to avoid solving the same problem twice, which I think in general we don't like to do.
It's not efficient. Yeah.
[CLAIRE] Yeah, part of why I invited Simon to be a keynote speaker at Citus Con year 2 was because I've been following him for years online, right?
Reading his blog, following him on Twitter, now also, you know, some of the other platforms.
And I always thought that there was something a little bit altruistic to his Today I Learned blog, right?
To how he shares insights into his learnings and his processes and his accomplishments.
And it turns out it's not altruistic at all. It's completely selfish.
And it was all motivated by the fact that he doesn't want to solve the same problem twice.
And so he documents it, and then he publishes it, and he benefits, but also the rest of us do too, which is kind of cool.
All right.
[PINO] Yeah, maybe we'll just mention, you know, it was also interesting to see the contrast between how, you know, Simon and Marco.
Marco worked much more in a team setting, so he was able to talk about the difference and the team point of view of working in open source.
So that was another interesting part of the conversation.
[CLAIRE] Yeah, yeah.
Marco spent years as the technical lead for the Citus open source project, and having him share that perspective on working in public was also useful.
Okay, episode two.
[PINO] So episode two was, the title of the episode was "Next 100 Million Users."
And the topic was, how does Postgres need to change or get ready for the next 100 million users?
We all know that this is a really fast-growing community.
We had as guests, we had four guests, which was more than we've had on any other episode.
We had Samay Sharma, who's now at Tembo, and Melanie Plageman, who's now a committer in Postgres, as well as Burak Yucesoy and Abdullah Ustuner, who are in the managed -- I'm sorry, were in the managed service of Azure Postgres.
So we had both open source folks, focus on open source, and folks focused on managed services, giving their perspective.
And so that was interesting because, for example, Burak was able to talk about pain points for the managed service, and managed service keeping up with PostgreSQL and making it easy for users and defaults.
And Samay and Melanie talked more about how either project could do -- some technical aspects of the project could change to accommodate new developers that are not DBAs or not as technical or just want -- come with an expectation of the database should work and just be easy and shouldn't necessarily have to try very hard.
But they also talked -- and I remember this -- Melanie talked a lot about making it easy to make your first commit and expanding the community in that way of inclusiveness.
And for me, what stuck with me about Melanie's part of the conversation was she talked about learning styles, and she talked about pair programming and learning from people.
And I thought that was very interesting.
That appealed to me because I actually like to learn that way a lot.
I love to learn from a conversation.
I learn faster.
It sticks better.
She talked about her early days in work environments where you learn by being side by side with folks.
[CLAIRE] I'm actually trying to get Melanie back on the show because she is one of the newest Postgres committers as of a couple of months ago.
I think it was announced at the end of April of 2024.
So I was trying to see if I could get Melanie and Richard Guo together to come back on the show because Richard is also -- they were both announced on the same day as the newest Postgres committers.
So we'll see if I'm successful with that.
But my big takeaway from this is that I would have loved to have all four of these people as separate guests.
In other words, there just wasn't enough time to hear from Samay and Melanie and Burak and Abdullah all together as a group, not in the hour-plus time that we had.
So as you can see, we've never had four guests on a single episode again, and we will never do it again.
It was just -- I found myself dissatisfied.
Like, oh, I wanted to hear more from each of them, and there just wasn't enough time.
[PINO] That's right.
And they had such different perspectives and interesting things to say.
Yes.
[CLAIRE] So I guess that was an anti-pattern of that episode.
[PINO] And maybe I'll say I don't think we asked them each to tell us their origin stories, but we did ask them about how they got involved with Postgres.
And I found that interesting because in later episodes, we made a point of asking about folks' origin stories.
And I think that's why, when I'm listening to old episodes, I found that part of the conversation so much fun.
Everybody has an interesting story to tell, a slightly different approach.
They may have come from -- I'm trying to remember.
Maybe it will come to me later.
I think it was Chelsea Dole who said she was studying econ and poli sci and then doing research,
she got into coding.
Others might have -- Thomas talked about how he programmed 8-bit computers when he was -- I can't remember how old, a child.
And so just looking back, you get a little bit of history.
You see everyone's journey is different.
And then a little bit about how people reason about what they like, why they went in what direction.
So the podcast, that aspect of the podcast was also helpful for folks in any -- maybe software, but in any part of software.
[CLAIRE] Yeah, there's a nice -- well, I was going to save this for when we talk about the episode with Chris Ellis later.
But one of my big takeaways from the Chris Ellis conversation was that there is no such thing as a traditional way of learning to be a developer.
There's no such thing as a traditional way of becoming a Postgres expert either, right?
And I found myself, I think in a few of the episodes, asking people, well, did they take the traditional learning path?
And I've just now hit myself on the head.
I've got a fresh bruise.
But I've realized that my assumption was wrong.
There is no traditional way.
Every single person has their own story, has their own path, and has their own journey.
And so that's the education of Claire, I guess.
Okay, so episode three.
The topic was why give talks at Postgres conferences.
And our guests were Boriss Mejías and Álvaro Herrera.
Boriss and Álvaro have known each other since university days.
And I can't remember if it was undergraduate or grad school.
But they have known each other for decades and obviously work together in the Postgres community now.
And I just love the friendship and the dynamic between the two of them.
Even though we have since moved to not always, but usually having just one guest, like today, Pino, you're the only guest.
I really thought it was fun to have Boriss and Álvaro together.
And also, we talked about the concept of, like, as you think about giving talks at a Postgres conference,
are more of the speakers extroverted, are more of the speakers introverted?
Does it help to be an extrovert or an introvert?
And I thought that was, they have very different teaching styles and very different ways of approaching their conference talks.
And so I found that contrast interesting.
And again, it validates the fact that there is no one best way to be a conference speaker.
[PINO] Yes, I'll second that.
I wanted to call out that Boriss has this amazing talk series, and I'm struggling to remember if it's DeBea?
[CLAIRE] Oh, Monica DeBea.
[PINO] Thank you, Monica DeBea.
This narrative style of teaching about Postgres by talking about Monica DeBea.
And I think, I don't know if he's disclosed whether this is based on a real character or someone he's invented.
But as she struggles with challenging problems in keeping her production systems running, it's just wonderful.
He just starts out with, you know, she's off and getting coffee, and she gets an alert, comes back, tries this, tries that, and it's captivating.
So shout out to Boriss for that creativity and how he gives talks.
[CLAIRE] Yeah, he gave Monica DeBea, DBA, I'm pronouncing the last name wrong, talk last year, Citus Con year 2.
And then he had another new talk based on that character this year.
And the artwork was done by Scarlett Riggs.
And I just thought it was a really cool way to teach in a storytelling style.
So I'll try to dig up the link and drop the link of his newest talk in here, because the video is available on YouTube now.
And I think, oh, someone's already got it for me.
Cool.
Postgres storytelling, what's going on with synchronous replication?
So there's a lot of technical learning that you get, but in a storytelling style, which is really, really cool.
Okay.
[PINO] And maybe I'll add, can I add, if just another second, it's that what's wonderful is that you also, because you've given a lot of talks and Álvaro has, and everybody has a slightly different approach, whether they want to repeat talks or have always new topics.
Again, you said introverted versus extroverted, but you did spend some time giving advice to people who are thinking about giving talks.
And I thought that was really, really interesting.
And it's worth repeating that the community is really open to new folks giving talks.
And maybe this is a quick segue.
You were on the talk selection committee for POSETTE.
And that's one of the goals, to give people who are new to giving talks a chance.
Is that right?
[CLAIRE] Yeah, I think a lot of the Postgres community events consider whether someone is a new speaker as a factor, as a positive factor.
Right?
Because we all know that everybody, even the best, most experienced speakers, once upon a time, they were new speakers and somebody had to give them a chance.
Right?
Somebody had to open that door.
And so I know for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres, we on the talk selection team considered it.
And in fact, next year for the CFP, I think I plan to make that an explicit field.
Because for some people, we knew they were a new speaker because they added that comment in the submission notes.
And for other people, they never mentioned it.
And we weren't sure.
And we kind of had to guess or had to do some research online and figure it out.
So I think I'm going to ask people explicitly in the CFP for next year.
But I was also on the talk selection team for PGDay Chicago this year as well.
And from my friends who serve in other talk selection teams, I do think it's something that we all think about.
Because you want to open that door to more people.
So if you are listening and you are thinking about giving a talk, but maybe you've never done it before, there are some good tips in that episode.
So it's probably worth listening to.
I also gave a lightning talk at pgDay Paris that was all about encouraging people to fight the butterflies and give their first conference talk.
And so I'll drop that link in there too.
I think there's a video recording of it.
And yeah, we want to encourage people to do this.
We want to hear from new voices.
[PINO] Awesome. Thanks.
All right.
So then I'll talk about episode four a bit.
So this was an episode titled "How I Got Started as a Dev and in PG," in Postgres.
And our guests were Thomas Munro and Melanie Plageman, whom we mentioned a second ago.
But I'll repeat that they're committers in PostgreSQL.
And OK, so before I talk about them, I should say one of the fun things was that in this episode, I learned a lot about you.
So, for example, I learned that when you talked about your origin story, you said that you had started out wanting to be a patent attorney and how that was related to things that adults had told you and things you'd felt as a child about being good at math and about debate.
So that was really very interesting.
And then I learned that you and Thomas bonded over talking about Solaris for a few hours when you first met, which was really fun.
And this maybe is a segue to Thomas talked a lot about how he really, really was always interested in, you know, ever since tinkering with his 8-bit Sinclair ZX81 back in the '80s, I think.
He then always wanted to understand how things worked under the covers, really understanding systems programming and hence that conversation with you about Solaris.
I think I already talked about how Melanie in this episode described her journey and learning and pair programming.
I think that was that EDB or at the time Second Quadrant?
[CLAIRE] Maybe Greenplum.
[PINO] Oh, Greenplum. Yes, yes.
Maybe.
Pivotal working at Greenplum.
Oh, apologies if we've.
[CLAIRE] We'll just have to have Melanie on the show in the future and get clarity or we can just check the transcript.
[PINO] Check the transcript. Absolutely.
I'm trying. It was a bit of a cramming session.
I'll just take a moment to say that although we had this homework and I listened to a few episodes almost fully and then I sampled from other episodes and it just really felt like, just as you said, a fireside chat, listening in, eavesdropping.
It was very comfortable. And the guests all had such, you know, such interesting things to say.
You could listen to them for hours.
But let's let's move on to episode five on this. Oh, sorry. I didn't give you a chance to reflect on episode four if you want to.
[CLAIRE] I was just going to say that that was the first episode where the title was how I got started as a developer and in Postgres.
And we have repeated that topic thematically across a few episodes with a few different guests.
And and I think it's a nice repeated theme and it reinforces that. Oh, wow. Everybody has had a different path.
And so if we if we look at.
I have this mission, maybe it's part of why I do the podcast, which is to help grow the Postgres community.
And if you want to grow the Postgres community, then that means opening the doors to new people joining in all sorts of capacities, you know, not just as developers, but there's other types of contributions as well, which is part of why I give this talk a couple of times called like Fibonacci spirals and, you know, other ways to contribute to Postgres beyond code.
Anyway, so like shining a light, though, on people's journeys in, I think is helpful to new prospective future Postgres developers, right?
Because it gives them that insight into all these different paths and to the fact that their path can be unique again, because there is no one right way to do it, so.
[PINO] I don't want to I don't want to derail us, but so I'll only ask for a link. I'd love to see a link to that Fibonacci spirals talk, because now you've got you've piqued my interest.
[CLAIRE] Oh, OK. OK, cool. Yeah. Slides are online, video's online, all that stuff. OK, cool.
So my talk number five was with Grant Fritchey and Ryan Booz. They both work at Redgate. And Grant is has worked in the SQL database world for literally decades before branching out and also starting to work on Postgres in the last several years.
And Ryan Booz, I had met him in Citus Con year 1, actually. He was a speaker and I've met him at other Postgres conferences because he's a frequent Postgres speaker.
Ryan used to work at Timescale before Redgate. And so what I liked about that episode is the topic was like my favorite ways to learn more about Postgres.
And it ended up producing this really rich set of links to books and blogs and conferences and newsletters and user groups and like all the places that they have gone or have recommended to other people in order to learn more about Postgres.
And so I just thought it was it was as if you were sitting down for coffee with a friend who knows a lot more about Postgres than you do, and they were walking you through, like, all the places you might go to learn.
And, you know, we all know people of different learning styles. So it was nice that they gave like a mixture, some links to videos and some links to books.
And, you know, people consume information differently. And, yeah, that was probably my favorite part of that episode.
[PINO] Great. Okay, then, then let's talk about episode six. You're probably already using Postgres. This episode was with Chelsea Dole of Brex and Floor Drees.
And what's really fun is that they come at it from this perspective of app developers who are using an ORM.
That's an object relational model that maps objects in a programming language to the database, to relational objects.
And therefore, to some extent, hides the database. And very often, and both Chelsea and Floor talked about this, it very often means that developers don't have to think much about the database.
It just works. Often it just works. And they talked about how, what happens when it stops working or why it's beneficial to go look under the covers.
And their journeys in learning Postgres. And actually it was interesting to see that it took them a bit in each of their cases.
They had, there had been some time in that mode where they just didn't think much about the database, the database works, it was behind the scenes.
And then what caused them to take a closer look. And how that became important.
And so tips for other app devs, application developers, how to get started at PostgreSQL, what are good resources, what are things to focus on first as an application developer.
Especially maybe understanding your queries versus more database administrator style topics.
Gosh, I want to say that, you know, we can't call out all of them, right. But every episode that we had, some of these folks, they've given talks, so many talks, right.
They've given talks in the community. They gave talks at POSETTE as well. So I'll just try and call out that Chelsea gave a talk I loved, how to work with other people.
[CLAIRE] Oh no, that was Floor.
[PINO] Sorry, Floor.
[CLAIRE] she co-presented with Jimmy.
Exactly.
[PINO] Yes, yes. Yeah.
[CLAIRE] Yeah, that video's online. That was at POSETTE. And it was, I think it took a lot of courage for them both to be open on that topic and to talk about it. And it was very moving.
There was a lot of positive support and feedback and response from people who were there.
All right, so episode seven was with Regina Obe and Paul Ramsey. And the topic was why people care about PostGIS.
And of course, we talked about in the beginning, we had to have the conversation about pronunciation.
And is it PostGIS or PostG-I-S or all the different ways of pronouncing that puppy.
Both Paul and Regina serve on the PostGIS steering committee. Paul's one of the co-founders of the PostGIS project. And Regina has been involved in a leadership role for decades as well.
And I knew Paul Ramsey before the podcast. I first met him in Lisbon back in like 2018 at PGConf EU.
But this, that podcast episode was my first real conversation with Regina. And I was so impressed. It's probably a big part of why I invited Regina to be one of the keynote speakers at POSETTE 2024.
But they covered a lot of ground. And for people who really know Postgres very well, but haven't paid a lot of attention to the open source geospatial world,
I think it's a very interesting conversation with just looking at this world from a completely different angle. So it's fun.
[PINO] It's a really big community, the PostGIS community.
[CLAIRE] Maybe even bigger than Postgres, frankly.
[PINO] Right.
[CLAIRE] Okay, so episode eight was with Andres Freund and Heikki Linnakangas. The topic was that repeated thematic topic of how I got started as a developer and in Postgres.
Andres Freund is of course a Postgres core team member and committer, works at Microsoft. Heikki is also a Postgres committer and he's co-founder of Neon.
But the interesting thing about this is on YouTube, there was a big spike in downloads immediately after Andres discovered the xz utils backdoor and, you know, saved the world.
So people all wanted to know more about his backstory, right?
[PINO] Yeah, exactly. And he found himself, you know, a celebrity overnight, of which it was fun to hear him talk about it too, how he adjusted to that, had lots of interview requests.
And I told my kids about this. It was really fun. The kids were really engaged in this story.
[CLAIRE] Yeah, I remember I was on my way to a dinner party, but I was talking to Andres on the phone, just kind of walking him through like some of the inquiries he was getting and the invitations to be on podcasts or get interviewed or whatever.
Definitely, you know, I think for someone who is not used to being in the limelight, at least if it were me, it would have made me uncomfortable.
I'm not speaking to how he feels. That's like his story to tell or not tell. But I was talking to him, and then I hung up the phone, and then I walked into my dinner party, and I was a couple minutes late, so I had to explain why.
And it was really interesting, because none of the other people at this dinner party work in tech, but they had all heard about this XZ Utils backdoor.
They had read about it in, you know, the New York Times or wherever they saw their news earlier that day.
And so that was kind of a weird moment. Usually the work that, you know, our Postgres teams do doesn't get any visibility by people at dinner parties that I go to.
So, all right, episode nine, solving every data problem in SQL.
[PINO] This episode was with Dimitri Fontaine and Vik Fearing, both longtime Postgres community members.
And they're really interesting. So, Dimitri has worked on a bunch of projects, pgloader, pgcopydb, pg_auto_failover.
And he's the author of a book, The Art of PostgreSQL, which is very well known in the Postgres community.
And every time we have a new person on the team, they go read that, and they have wonderful things to say about it.
So, they recommend it a lot.
And Vik Fearing is at EDB. He's also SQL -- sorry, he works on the SQL standard.
So, that was interesting. He talked about -- I think he'd been at the time of the podcast, he said he'd been on the SQL standard committee for about a year
and had gotten a few of his proposals accepted into the standard.
He talks about CAS in Postgres, those stuff, I guess some -- anyway, I won't go into the technical details.
Please do check out the episode on that.
And maybe I'll just say they both were very enthusiastic about this idea that you really want to push the limit on how you use SQL.
I'm going to keep saying sequel, but they pointed -- Vic pointed out that it's S-Q-L.
And so, for example, Vic had done the Advent of Code challenge, and we'll drop a link to that.
But it's a challenge where I think they dropped two problems a day throughout the month of December.
And the problems are not really ideally solved with SQL, but can be.
And so, some other folks had gotten interested in that.
By the way, the Advent of Code is huge. I think they -- in the last few years have passed a million participants.
And the conversation went to a lot of different places, you know, why -- for example, we talked about timestamps and the flexibility of Postgres in solving problems.
So, please check out that episode.
Oh, still now, episode 10.
My journey into Postgres monitoring. That was with Lukas Fittl of pganalyze and also -- sorry, the company, pganalyze, and the video blog, 5 Minutes of Postgres.
And Rob Treat, who talked a lot about Circonus, but I don't recall right now.
Maybe you can chime in. And Rob Treat is a well-known speaker at community events and organizer of Postgres community events.
So, they talked a lot about monitoring, how they'd come to use monitoring because they needed it for themselves, for their own purposes, and then how they made tools and either consulted and brought those tools to the community.
That was another of these episodes where, thanks to their -- and the contributions of folks in the chat, got a ton of links to useful tools for monitoring.
And then there was a little bit of a meta conversation about observability versus monitoring and the perspective of -- interesting, if you like these meta conversations.
I found it very interesting and how the monitoring is maybe viewed differently in a community like the Postgres layer versus what you're looking for in observability in the application.
[CLAIRE] Awesome. Yeah.
Rob Treat has been a really amazing advisor to me in particular.
Sometimes when I run into tricky questions, I turn to Rob. He's the admin for the Postgres Slack, in fact.
So, that's how I DM him. That's how I reach him so that we can talk about things.
And he was actually one of the co-hosts for Citus Con year 2 in one of the live streams, which was kind of a volunteer role for him.
And I really appreciate it. He did a great job.
All right. So, Episode 11 was with Jelte Fennema-Nio and Marco Slot.
And the topic was "My Journey into Benchmarking Performance."
And Jelte and Marco are engineers that I had worked with for years at Microsoft.
And they both know a lot about benchmarking Postgres and benchmarking Citus in particular.
And they both have blogged about it as well. So, there's probably a couple blog links I should drop in there at some point into the Discord chat, I mean.
But they generously shared kind of their perspective and their learnings and their thoughts about HammerDB and some of the other benchmarking tools that are out there.
And it was just for anybody who needs to spin up on benchmarking, I think it's a really useful episode to listen to.
And then Episode 12 was with Derk van Veen, who the topic was "From Developer to Postgres Specialist."
And Derk is one of the many Postgres people who you might see playing chess in the hallways at a Postgres conference.
I can remember sitting near him, actually, at the pgDay Paris speaker dinner earlier this year.
And the chess... He has some kind of portable mobile chess board.
It's basically a piece of cloth that you lay out on the table and then pull the pieces out.
And then, before you know it, people were playing chess after dinner.
Better than dessert, I guess. Healthier than dessert. [Great way to meet people]
But that conversation was fascinating for anybody who I think is a developer but finds themselves being drawn to questions about the database.
And it was really interesting to hear about his journey from being a developer to becoming the specialist at his company.
And if you're wondering whether that future is for you, I think this episode is pretty interesting.
And the quote that I love from it is "The best days are days when things don't go as planned."
That was the money quote.
[PINO] I love that quote.
So then I'll talk about episode 13, which was spinning up on Postgres and AI with Arda Aytekin.
And Arda is a colleague of mine.
And what's interesting is we started the podcast in the year of ChatGPT.
We said late March. That was episode one.
And so AI kept coming up in all the episodes.
Maybe not in all the episodes, but in many episodes, this question came up of how will AI, how will Gen AI affect our work, change the future, or affect what we do?
And so this was our chance to really dive deep on the topic.
And Arda gave a crash course in AI terminology, giving some concepts so that a nice conversational introduction.
Data engineering versus data science.
Talked about responsible AI.
What is Hugging Face, the repository for machine learning models or one of the large catalogs for ML models.
Embeddings, prompt engineering.
Anyway, if you want to learn about AI, that was a great episode.
And I should say, of course, and how it applies in Postgres, so the extensions that are relevant for AI in Postgres.
[CLAIRE] All right.
Episode 14.
Our guest was Chris Ellis.
And the topic was becoming expert at using Postgres.
And I think I mentioned earlier in today's episode that my big takeaway was that there is no such thing as a traditional way of learning how to be an engineer.
And I need to eradicate that term, that concept, that assumption from my lexicon.
I just have to get rid of it.
I also thought Chris is such a good storyteller.
And so hearing him talk about his experiences just made it fun.
That podcast could be literally two or three times as long as it was.
And if I were a listener, I would still be listening at the end of it.
There was a quote that we included in the description of the episode, too, that I thought was really interesting, too, which is that for him, the most productive place is not in a quiet library, but in a coffee shop.
That that is where he can sometimes get the most done.
And so that just reinforced the fact, you know, I've always been a library person myself.
So people are different.
And that's a good thing.
So I had also prior to inviting Chris to be a guest on this episode, I had been with him at Nordic PGDay, saw him give a talk there and saw him give a really interesting lightning talk at pgDay Paris as well.
And so right now, as I talk about him and this episode, I'm holding one of his electric elephants that he made kind of as a hobby project.
And he made it he gave a talk about it at PGDay Paris. And I am going to drop that link in because I just thought it was just a fun intersection between, you know, his interests in Postgres and in electronics.
So.
[PINO] And folks can hear more about it in the in the episode, too, that it was very popular and it was a great story to hear.
[CLAIRE] All right. Episode 15, that's you, Michael Christofides.
[PINO] And I'll say that. Yeah. And I'll just say so. Episode 14 was my last episode as your co-host.
And it was wonderful. And then I sort of I've said that I said at the time that I felt more comfortable being in the audience than being in the in being a co-host.
And of course, I'm back today and happy to be back. But that hasn't changed.
But so that was my last episode. And therefore, in episode 15 with Michael Christofides, you were the sole host and you all had a great conversation, the two of you.
And this was also, I think, the first time you had as a as a guest, a podcaster.
And Michael was super supportive. I always I should say this is an intro. Michael Christofides, probably everyone knows him, but Michael Christofides is author and he's pgMustard, both a tool and a company, for visualizing, explain and doing performance analysis and also a co-host of the podcast Postgres FM.
And first of all, I'll say Michael was so encouraging. I really enjoyed it. He was encouraging.
He said he'd watched all he'd listened to all the episodes of the podcast, which was which was fantastic, because I think Michael and his co-hosts have done over 100 episodes now of Postgres FM.
They're very well known. And and actually, Michael later said in the episode that that he's really encouraging of Postgres podcasts in general and tries to listen to to to all of them or a lot of them.
So that was great. And of course, yes, you know, the episode was about EXPLAIN. So Michael gave gave tech.
We had technical details about explain, but was interesting. You know, you commented that buffers only came up the 40th minute of the episode. There was a lot of there was a lot of other there are a lot of other topics.
And finally, I'm going to move to episode 16, which was,
Yeah, so before the one we're having right now, it was about the making of POSETTE and and so we heard from you interviewed Aaron Wislang and Teresa Giacomini.
Aaron is one of our producers here as well. And Teresa Giacomini is the, sorry, the chair of POSETTE.
And they talked about the making of the conference.
Lots of interesting things to talk about. So, of course, we we talked about the rename, which we did today as well.
And then we thought we talked about lots of things. The things that stood out for me was the discussion of virtual versus in-person conferences.
We had an interesting discussion. Sorry, you all had an interesting discussion. And in the chat, we were also having a very interesting discussion and we're hearing from different people about about how they felt about it.
And that had come up, by the way, in the conference itself. I remember having a conversation, you know, and folks chiming in about what they liked.
And, you know, you need both kinds of conferences, right? You love in-person conferences. So there's space for all of these things.
We talked about recordings. I want to call out that I think we had the recordings were ready ahead.
So they were published. Sorry, let me just think for a second. So we watched the stream was us watching together pre-recorded talks with the authors in the in the live chat.
So the authors were available for questions while their talks were playing. And of course, we had live co-host discussion as well.
And and the recordings then were reposted with something like 20 translations.
And during the during the event, a language was added, which I thought was really, really nice.
It really spoke to the inclusiveness of of the event. And the event was happening in different in different time zones.
And all of that, Aaron and Teresa were able to talk to the complexity of making that happen, as well as the how talk you talked a little bit about how talk selection happened.
So that was a great episode for anyone interested in how do you run a conference? What kinds of things come up? What are the learnings?
[CLAIRE] I think one of the things that was so rewarding for me with POSETTE: An Event for Postgres is that the previous two years I was a co-chair with Teresa Giacomini on the event.
And then this year, in year three, I took a step back. I still remain chair of the talk selection team and was heavily involved in the renaming of the virtual event.
But Teresa chaired the entire event, soup to nuts. And it was just really cool to see to see her in that role and to see all the changes she made and all the improvements that she and the team made in it and just see it keep getting better with with me just being in the background.
So as a manager, as a leader, it's just kind of cool. It's great to see people thrive and grow and just make magic happen.
And the feedback we've gotten from speakers and attendees about their experience was really, really good.
So, of course, now that that means the expectations and the bar is raised for what next year is going to be like in year four.
But it was fun. And Aaron, to have him as a guest, whereas normally he's a co-producer on this show, was really, really cool to have him on the other side of the microphone.
Okay.
[PINO] I should say we should shout out that Aaron, along with Ari right now, our producers, they're running the show right now and making sure our sound quality is good and participating in the...
[CLAIRE] In the Discord chat.
[PINO] Thank you both.
[CLAIRE] Yes, very much couldn't do it without the two of you.
Okay. We've walked through all 16 episodes, which is really cool, but we would be remiss if we didn't point out that we are, you know, we are one among several different Postgres podcasts.
And I thought we could just give a quick shout out to the other community of podcasters, starting with perhaps the oldest one that's been...
It's currently up to episode 323.
I was just looking at the latest episode and it's called Scaling PostgreSQL with Creston Jamison.
And I think...
[PINO] I think it's a great one. I think it's weekly and Creston goes over, he summarizes the blogs and videos related to Postgres for the week.
And he does a great job.
[CLAIRE] So, and obviously I worked on Citus, the open source extension as my main area of focus for many years.
And Citus is all about scaling Postgres.
So he came onto my radar ages and ages ago, but it's, it's yeah, well-known, popular, important and valuable.
The next one is Postgres FM with, let me see if I've got it up here, with Nikolay and Michael as the two co-hosts.
And yeah, they just had their hundredth episode.
I think they're probably even further than that.
And then I...
[PINO] You were recently a guest.
[CLAIRE] I was the guest on episode 99.
So I, it was fun. It was really fun.
Michael Christofides, he has this belief that his goal is just to make the guests look good.
And I'm, I just want to kind of copy that spirit and do that with my guests as well.
Although he's very skilled at it.
He wants to make you look good.
He wants to make you feel comfortable and he wants to give interesting learnings and insights and conversations to his listeners.
So anyway, our topic was sponsoring the community and we got to talk a bit about POSETTE, of course,
but we also talked about, you know, Microsoft sponsoring conferences and a little bit about this podcast.
And I can't even remember everything else we talked about.
So I will drop a link to that episode if somebody else has an already into the Discord chat.
But it was fun. Really, really fun.
And this is super popular.
They just started it in, was it 2022? Late 2022?
So it's only been around a couple of years, but people like it.
Very much so.
[PINO] And there's a video version of that.
Some of them they do with video as well, right?
Was your episode with video?
[CLAIRE] Yeah, they're all recorded with video.
But obviously on the podcast platforms, it's just the audio.
So you have to go to YouTube to see the version with the video.
And everywhere else, like if you go to Apple podcasts or whatever, then it's it's just audio.
OK, so if we were listing podcasts in age order, ours is next.
Right. Scaling Postgres is the oldest, then Postgres FM and then Path to Citus Con, which is now called Talking Postgres.
And then after that is Hacking Postgres, which is hosted by Ry Walker of Tembo.
And Ry is an absolutely wonderful person.
I met him, I think, for the first time at PGConf New York City last year.
And they've had a bunch of really interesting guests on their show.
And I'm not sure exactly what episode they're up to because they're doing the seasons thing.
So I'd have to do a little bit of arithmetic here to figure that out.
Oh, wow. OK, well, they've had a bunch.
I know Melanie Plageman was a recent guest as well, and I have not listened to her, her episode.
But I'm sure she talked about PGConf.dev, the recent Vancouver event, since I know she was one of the organizers of that.
And then there's The Builders. So I wanted to give a shout out to them as well.
They've only had three episodes so far, but it was hosted by Gulcin Jelinek of EDB.
And I'll see if there's going to be more, if it was just a three part mini series or if there are more episodes in their future. I'm waiting to find out.
[PINO] I hope I hope they I hope they do more.
And then you mentioned 5mins of Postgres earlier, which is not a podcast.
[CLAIRE] But Lukas Fittl of pganalyze does this five minute video on YouTube.
Is it weekly? Is that is that right, Pino?
[PINO] I'm not sure. It might be it might be weekly.
[CLAIRE] Three weeks, one month, one month. It looks approximately weekly. He's up to one hundred and nineteen videos so far, which is kind of cool.
And the very, first one. Let's see if I can I can find out when it was.
Looks like it was two years ago-ish. And I know when I was at PGConf.dev,
I think it was Robert Haas who said somebody should give Lukas Fittl a prize for this.
This is such a valuable contribution to for him to kind of be canvassing all the things that are being published and introduced and blogged about and then sharing his interpretation of why they matter in a nice, succinct, digestible format on a weekly basis.
It's kind of cool. So those are our shout outs.
[PINO] I think it's definitely, definitely wonderful to have all these different choices.
And then they're all a bit different in length. For example, I might be off by a bit, but maybe scaling Postgres is usually about 20, 25 minutes.
The five minute format, you know, longer format. We tend to go over an hour in this one.
I think Nikolay and Michael do about that for Postgres FM. Just the I think that that that speaks to the inclusivity of the community, that we have all these options for learning and for getting to know, getting to know the community members.
[CLAIRE] Yeah, I think Postgres FM might actually be shorter. I feel like they try to keep theirs to about 20 to 30 minutes each, which it definitely reduces production time and it makes it digestible.
And I feel like in our case, we go longer, but we're monthly. Right.
So from a listener perspective, they're going to get a more detailed, more in-depth conversation with someone.
And ours is a completely different vibe in that you're eavesdropping on a conversation, right, versus talking about a specific topic more with more focus.
I don't know if I'm comparing or contrasting [maybe a little less structure, maybe a little less structure in our.]
That's fair. But in a good way, less structure in a good way. I'm going to go for that.
OK, so before we wrap today and while you're still here as a guest.
And by the way, a couple of people were a little worried that something went wrong between you and me, that there was a drama, that there was a reason you left, that we weren't public about.
But that's not true, right?
[PINO] That's not true. That's not true. And I think I explained it at the end of the episode that maybe, you know, sometimes, you know, it bears repeating.
I don't feel really comfortable in this in this. In fact, I had missed, you know, misgivings about coming back as a as a as a co-host because I get really nervous.
I mean, it really the day before the 24 hours before a recording.
I'm really so nervous and I try to mask it. And that's primarily what you know.
And I and I and it was a challenge to myself. And I really appreciated that you invited me as co-host.
You've been a mentor to me as, you know, in terms of hosting a podcast.
And I feel like I learned a lot. But every time I was it was a bit of an experiment.
It was a bit of an experiment for me to see if over time I'd get more relaxed about it and feel differently.
But so when we got to about a year, I sort of thought to myself, well, this isn't really changing.
And it was a it was fun, but I'd rather listen. And that's and that's that was the motivation.
So I approached you. I said, Claire, let's what do you think about, you know, my retiring?
So you were very supportive. You tried to convince me and offer me other kinds of support.
But I really appreciate that you you didn't push too hard because it didn't make it uncomfortable.
Well, we do miss you. But I I'm so happy that you stayed on as long as you did, because that your initial deal was not to do this for a full year.
That was not our original agreement. So you stayed on a lot longer than I could have ever hoped and expected.
And I'm glad you came back today as a guest. I did have fun along with.
Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I talked about sort of, you know, there's these two things that can happen.
Interestingly, it can happen at the same time. I mean, it can be really nervous and worried.
Then I appreciate the memory and they're having fun as well.
[CLAIRE] Yeah. But maybe we should have made up a really fun story. I mean, I am half Greek, half Italian.
You're are you all Italian? Like we could have had this some dramatic argument. I don't know. Anyway.
[PINO] Oh, some disagreement about who has better olives.
[CLAIRE] All right. So are there any surprises from podcasting about Postgres that we want to shine a light on before we give it a wrap today?
I already mentioned that we had that learning that don't have four guests on one episode.
It's more like a panel discussion and less like a, you know, a conversation, I guess.
[PINO] Right. Yes. Yes. And then maybe another learning was that the origin stories were something we felt really resonated.
It was interesting to hear the audience liked it and the and the guests as well.
So we made a point of asking everyone how they got started.
Maybe I want to I wanted to ask you a little bit about, you know, just spend a few minutes explaining to us, how do you line up guests for the for the podcast?
What's your thinking about that? And then how do you work with the guests to come up with?
[CLAIRE] That is a really good question. How do I line up guests? I have a brainstorming document.
And every single time I think of or somebody suggests to me a possible guest or a possible topic, I just put it in this file.
So it's just a doc with a bunch of bullets in it. And that.
You know, there's gosh, Taylor Swift. I saw Taylor Swift interviewed once and she talked about how it's important when you get an idea to write it down,
because if you think you're going to remember it later, like that's such a good idea.
That's so obvious. I'll remember it later. I don't need to write it down. Poof, it's gone.
And so the second I do get suggestions or ideas, I put them in that doc.
And if I can't get to that doc, then I'll put it in, like, the notes app in my my phone and then transfer it over later.
But that's a little risky because what if I forget that it's there and I forget to transfer it?
And then, you know, when the cool thing is right now, I think we're booked through November.
So, so that's really nice for me. It's not quite as stressful of, oh, my gosh, I need to line up next month's guest.
You know, we're booked in advance and there's more of a runway. But a lot of like.
[PINO] But what made the difference? Is it is it that, you know, we got you got better at lining up guests or because we were, you know, the podcast has been running for longer.
[CLAIRE] So there's more awareness. That's a really good question.
I think part of it is maybe I'm more organized. Maybe part of it is that as the podcast gets more listeners and more brand awareness, if you will, or just more people aware of what it is, then, you know, maybe I'm getting more suggestions from people.
We have had people come and invite themselves like I want to be on your podcast.
And that's cool. Like the first time, the second time that happens, that's a really nice feeling.
So it's there's no there's no simple black and white answer to that question about.
[PINO] Well, I do appreciate hearing about your brainstorming, doc, because I because I was wondering about, you know, that that that process and the idea that, you know, things have to bake for a while.
Right. Like you get an idea. You might want to touch base with the person.
They sit in the brainstorming doc for a while before they become a planned episode.
[CLAIRE] You asked also about how I work with guests on what the topic will be and what the focus will be.
And going back to something Michael Christofides said, like where he wants to make his guests look good.
One of my goals also is to try to make it easy for our guests.
And obviously, Ari and Aaron, Ari Padilla Acosta and Aaron Wislang are co-producers. They're part of that as well.
But when I do the outreach, I try to give people up front like these are my four ideas for what our topics could be.
And this is what it would be like. And I try to set their expectations to take away some of the uncertainty about it and try to imagine what their questions are going to be.
And to answer their questions up front. And there's two reasons I do that.
One is I want them to be as comfortable as possible. And then two, like if they have a lot of uncertainty, they're just going to say no.
So if I do think they'd make a great guest and I want them to say yes, then I need to invite them in a way that answers all the questions.
I mean, it's no different than when you get an invitation to go to a party.
It has to include the basics like where and when and why and, you know, RSVP by deadline and gifts or no gifts.
And, you know, you just need to set people's expectations.
[PINO] Love it, Claire, that you give analogies. And that's been one of the themes of the, you know, in several podcasts, or at least for me, I've noticed that you look for those analogies, you give those analogies.
And it's a way you structure your thought process. And it's fun.
[CLAIRE] Well, Pino.
Is that something you learned or I don't know, you've been doing it for a long time?
It's so funny because there's a lot of attorneys in my family and my husband is fond of saying that analogy is the weakest form of argument.
But I think analogies are really nice because they help people fit a concept or an idea into a mental model that they already have.
Right. And I just think that's a nice shortcut. And our brains are always looking for shortcuts because there's so much coming at us all the time.
Right. So much to digest and process and do.
And, you know, at the end of every day, I have to decide, am I going to be happy with what I accomplished or unhappy about the much longer list of things I didn't do?
And so I like the shortcuts that analogies give. And I didn't realize I did it a lot. That's interesting. That's a new a new perspective.
[PINO] And is it something you learned to do or?
[CLAIRE] I don't know, because I didn't realize I did it a lot. I mean, this is I'm hearing this for the first time.
[PINO] It comes to you naturally.
[CLAIRE] Yeah. But I do I do I do think they're effective. So, OK, I think it's time to wrap.
And I want to say thank you, Pino, for joining as a guest, for coming back, for doing this kind of looking back at the greatest hits of past 16 episodes.
I'm chatting about the rename a little bit. I'm super happy about the Talking Postgres name and also giving a shout out to the other podcasters in the Postgres world.
[PINO] I want to say thank you. You're welcome, and thank you for involving me in this wonderful experience.
[CLAIRE] All right. So our next episode is going to be recorded live on an unusual day of the week.
It's not going to be on a Wednesday morning. Our next episode will be recorded live on Tuesday, August 6th at 4 p.m. PDT.
Our guest is David Rowley, who is based in New Zealand, which is why we're recording on a Tuesday afternoon, California time.
And the topic with David Rowley will be how I got started as a developer and in Postgres.
If you want to join the live recording, you can mark your calendar at aka.ms/talkingpostgres-ep18-cal.
And you can always get to past episodes and get links to this podcast on all the podcasting platforms at talkingpostgres.com.
Transcripts are included on the episode pages on that website as well.
And be sure to tell all your friends about the podcast rename so that they don't think that Path To Citus Con has disappeared and they know it's now called Talking Postgres.
Before we leave, if you have enjoyed this podcast, please rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform because it will help other folks find this new show.
And if you don't want to do a rating online but are comfortable just posting a note on whatever social platform you like to use, Twitter, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Threads, whatever it is, that works too.
And a big thank you to everybody who joined the recording live and participated in the live text chat on Discord and gave us inspiration and energy during today's conversation.
Thank you.