2024.pgconf.dev and Growing the Community

I think 2024.pgconf.dev was a great event. I am really grateful to the organizing team for all the work that they did to put this event together, and I think they did a great job. I feel that it was really productive for me and for the PostgreSQL development community as a whole. Like most things in life, it was not perfect. But it was really good, and I'm looking forward to going back next year. It was also a blast to see Professor Margo Seltzer again; I worked for her as a research assistant many years ago. She gave a wonderful keynote.

Hacking on PostgreSQL is Really Hard

Hacking on PostgreSQL is really hard. I think a lot of people would agree with this statement, not all for the same reasons. Some might point to the character of discourse on the mailing list, others to the shortage of patch reviewers, and others still to the difficulty of getting the attention of a committer, or of feeling like a hostage to some committer's whimsy. All of these are problems, but today I want to focus on the purely technical aspect of the problem: the extreme difficulty of writing reasonably correct patches.

Praise, Criticism, and Dialogue

When my children were little and I was trying to figure out how to be a parent, I read someplace that you need to have five positive interactions with your child for each negative one to maintain a good relationship. I don't know whether that is fact or myth; a quick Google search suggests that the origin of the idea was in a study about how married couples argue, the idea being that in a good marriage, positive things continue to happen even amidst disagreement. It's wise to be wary about applying a number discovered in a very specific context more generally, but there's a compelling idea here: positive interactions build us up, and negative ones break us down, regardless of whether we're talking about a spouse, a child, or, say, the PostgreSQL community. Too many negative interactions and we just feel like giving up.

The PostgreSQL Documentation and the Limitations of Community

In my opinion, the PostgreSQL documentation is simultaneously excellent and fairly poor, and both its excellence and its shortcomings are direct results of the process by which the documentation is produced. The PostgreSQL documentation is stored in the same git repository as the source code, and anyone who patches the source code so as to change documented behavior must also patch the documentation to match.