Ten Postgres Hacker Journeys—and what they teach us
Presented by:
Claire Giordano
Claire Giordano is a PostgreSQL contributor who leads open source community efforts for Postgres at Microsoft and serves on the Board for the PGCA non-profit that protects the Postgres trademarks. Claire also hosts a monthly podcast called Talking Postgres. Before joining Microsoft via the Citus acquisition, Claire served in leadership roles in engineering, product management, and product marketing at Sun Microsystems, Amazon/A9, and Citus Data. At Sun, she led the engineering team behind Solaris Zones—and spearheaded the open sourcing of the Solaris operating system. Claire earned an Sc.B. in Applied Mathematics & Computer Science from Brown University.
No video of the event yet, sorry!
When I first got into software engineering, I thought studying history was a waste of time. I’ve since learned that understanding how people got where they are—and what they learned along the way—is one of the fastest ways to level up.
This talk shares lessons from 10 Postgres major contributors about how they became effective Postgres hackers. But the talk isn’t just for contributors. Whether you’re an app developer, DBA, data engineer, someone who’s thinking about becoming a contributor, or just someone who uses Postgres every day, you’ll find takeaways here.
This is an updated version of a talk I gave at PGConf NYC 2025. You’ll hear how these Postgres hackers first got involved, how they learned through code, and—maybe most importantly—the invisible curriculum they had to navigate along the way.
Even if you never plan to contribute to Postgres, these hacker stories pull back the curtain on how a handful of PG contributors got their start—and what they picked up along the way. Whether you’re early in your career or deep into it, these stories give us all something to think about.
- Date:
- Duration:
- 45 min
- Room:
- Conference:
- PGConf India, 2026
- Language:
- Track:
- Case Study
- Difficulty:
- Easy