PostgreSQL Hacking Workshop - September 2024

Our talk for September 2024 will is by Andrey Borodin on his Youtube Channel "Byte Relay." The talk is Walk-through of Implementing Simple Postgres Patch: From sources to CI. I picked this talk for two reasons: first, in the poll I ran in the PostgreSQL Hacker Mentoring Discord, it got almost as many votes as the talk we did this month on the query planner. Second, I wanted to have at least some content that was targeted toward newer developers.

Posting Your Patch On pgsql-hackers

Sometimes, people post patches to pgsql-hackers and... nothing happens. No replies, no reviews, nothing. Other times, people post to patches to pgsql-hackers and a bunch of discussion ensues, but nothing gets committed. If you're the sort of person who likes to write patches for PostgreSQL, or if you're being paid to do so, you'd probably like to avoid having these things happen to you. In this blog post, I'm going to explain what I think you should do maximize the chances of a good outcome (no guarantees!).

PostgreSQL Hacking Workshop - August 2024

I'm pleased to be able to formally announce the PostgreSQL Hacking Workshop, as well as our first two topics, planned for August and September 2024. 

Mentoring Program Updates

Here are a few updates on the mentoring program that I announced in a previous blog post.

First, I ended up keeping applications open for 12 days. During that time, I got 34 applications. Many of the 9 committer-mentors who initially offered to mentor one person ended up deciding that they would be willing to mentor two people, so I was able to send out 14 acceptances, which I think is a great result, especially considering that this is the first time we've done something like this.

Mentoring Program for Code Contributors

Yesterday, I announced a call for applications for a new mentoring program for PostgreSQL code contributors that I'm trying to start. I'm posting this on my blog as well for better visibility, and also to offer a few more comments and thoughts on this general topic of mentoring.

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.