Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano

Who knew an aptitude test could recommend a career as a DBA—and get it right? In Episode 44 of Talking Postgres, PostgreSQL significant contributor Karen Jex walks Claire through her path from Oracle DBA to Postgres consultant, solution architect, and now senior software engineer at Snowflake. My favorite bits: a project switched to Postgres when nobody knew how to install it, faking it as the Postgres expert, and the culture shock of building your own HA and backups. Plus: the warm welcome at PGConf EU 2019 that pulled Karen into the Postgres community; the new Buddy Program at PGConf EU 2026; and moving to the French Alps for the love of mountain biking.
Previously on Talking Postgres:
Talking Postgres podcast Ep39: From MemSQL to HorizonDB, an engineer's journey with Adam Prout
Talking Postgres podcast Ep42: How AI is changing software development with Simon Willison
Links mentioned in this episode:
Conference: PGConf.EU 2026 in Valencia on 20-23 Oct
Save the date for: POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2027, happening 30 & 31 March 2027
Two days this time: FOSDEM PGDay 2027, happening 28 & 29 Jan 2027
Conference: PGConf.dev 2027 in Montréal
Conference: PG Day France
Conference: PGConf India 2027, on 2-5 March 2027
Conference: EuroPython 2026
PGConf.EU conference talk: Tuning Postgres for Analytics, by Karen Jex
DjangoCon Europe 2024 keynote: When I Grow Up I Want to be a Database Administrator, by Karen Jex
POSETTE speaker page: Karen Jex, with videos of her talks
PGConf.EU 2023 talk: Elephant in a nutshell - Navigating the Postgres community 101, by Valeria Kaplan
FOSDEM 2020 talk slides: Fibonacci Spirals and 21 Ways to Contribute to Postgres—Beyond Code, by Claire Giordano
PostgreSQL.org: Contributor Profiles
PostgreSQL Europe: PostgreSQL Europe board
PostgreSQL docs: PostgreSQL 19 release notes
Voice dictation: Wispr Flow
Voice dictation: FluidVoice
In this episode, we covered:
00:00 Intro & music
01:55 Becoming a DBA completely by accident
05:46 "You're the database expert. You can figure it out."
12:37 Leaving Oracle, where everything comes bundled
17:23 From DBA to helping other DBAs
21:48 The PGDay France meeting that opened up the community
28:02 Why Django developers love Postgres
34:36 Stepping back to be close to home
43:54 "When I grow up, I want to be a DBA," said no one ever
51:42 How much should you delegate to AI agents?
59:22 Thirty five buddy pairings at PGConf EU

How does a fix for psql tab completion turn into 25 years of contributing to Postgres? In Episode 43 of Talking Postgres, Peter Eisentraut—PostgreSQL committer, core team member, SQL standards contributor, and Chief Architect of Database Servers at EDB—joins Claire to trace that journey. We dig into how scratch-your-own-itch development drew him in, why “the things you do, people welcome them” kept him coming back, and how Postgres changed as it grew from a small database community into a massive ecosystem where, from the Postgres mailing list perspective, “most of the user base is silent.” Plus: what it feels like when code you commit goes straight to everybody who uses Postgres, and the implications of the EU Cyber Resilience Act.
Previously on Talking Postgres:
Talking Postgres podcast Ep24: Why mentor Postgres developers with Robert Haas
Talking Postgres podcast Ep26: Open Source Leadership with Bruce Momjian
Talking Postgres podcast Ep32: The Fundamental Interconnectedness of All Things with Boriss Mejías
Links mentioned in this episode:
Conference: FOSDEM 2027
LinkedIn: FOSDEM PGDay 2027 announcement
Conference: Prague PostgreSQL Developers Day (P2D2)
Conference: PGDay Lowlands 2026 (the “friendliest” conference)
Conference: PGConf EU 2026 in Valencia on 20-23 Oct
PGConfEU Conference talk: What does the EU Cyber Resilience Act mean for PostgreSQL and its community
Wikipedia: EU Cyber Resilience Act
PGConf.dev on LinkedIn: PGConf.dev account
PGConf.dev conference talk: Committer Review: An Exercise in Paranoia, by Robert Haas
PostgreSQL.org: Committers
PostgreSQL mailing list: Postgres 19 release management team
Blog: Peter Eisentraut Blog
Blog post: Where are all the PostgreSQL users, by Peter Eisentraut 
PGCA non-profit: PostgreSQL Community Association
Brett Cannon at PyCon 2014: I came for the language but I stayed for the community 
Planet PostgreSQL: Blog aggregation feed
In this episode, we covered:
00:00 Intro & music
02:14 Tinkering with the Commodore 64 
07:57 The itch that became psql tab completion
15:43 Had to make opportunities
23:05 From posting at night to posting during the day
24:40 Why he stopped committing in the afternoon
28:04 On the ground floor of something that grew
30:34 What the Postgres core team actually does
31:47 Borrowing ideas from other OSS projects
36:51 Bringing Postgres into the SQL standards process
38:40 Getting to hang out with database nerds
42:01 Mentoring Postgres contributors
50:56 Making time for Postgres conferences
53:35 What the Cyber Resilience Act means for Postgres
57:36 Where are all the Postgres users?
1:07:00 Becoming a committer early on in Postgres
1:16:22 Contributing to Postgres isn't just writing code
1:19:40 Why FOSDEM is still his favorite
1:22:15 Finding familiar problems in a compiler devroom
1:26:14 Shout-out to the Planet Postgres feed

What’s your gold standard for deciding whether AI-written code is ready for production? In Episode 42 of Talking Postgres, Simon Willison—creator of Datasette, co-creator of Django, and prolific open-source developer—joins Claire to share how AI is changing the way he builds software today. We dig into why his test for shipping AI-generated code is “Could I explain this to somebody else?”, how engineering management skills can be surprisingly useful when managing AI agents, and how the bottleneck is no longer writing code but understanding it. Also: personal credibility, deep research, the Winchester Mystery House, slop proxies, and Simon’s observation that “Features are cheap. That doesn’t mean you should build them all.”

Previously on Talking Postgres:
Talking Postgres podcast Ep 30: AI for data engineers with Simon Willison 
Links mentioned in this episode:
Blog: Simon Willison’s Blog
Project page: Datasette, for finding stories in data
GitHub repo: sqlite-utils
Blog post: Release of alchemy-utils 0.1a0 (featuring Postgres & DuckDB)
Blog post: There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text, by Sophie Alpert
Podcast episode: The Open Weight Revolution with Simon Willison, on Oxide and Friends
Podcast episode: An AI state of the union, on Lenny’s Podcast 
Wikipedia: Winchester Mystery House
Idea in Mythical Man-Month: Conceptual integrity
Blog post: SQLite compressed text-history prototypes, by Simon Willison
Tools: Simon’s miscellaneous tools repo
In this episode, we covered:

00:00 Intro & music
04:00 A week of work before breakfast
09:12 Red-green TDD makes agents exercise every line
14:42 A million lines mean nothing if you don’t understand it
18:28 Finding low-hanging fruit among open PRs & issues
22:07 Getting work done while walking the dog
23:01 Gold standard: “Could I explain this to somebody else?”
28:27 Slop proxies add no value at all
30:49 Aggressive nitpicking reviews
35:01 Everything in software engineering is about trade-offs
41:16 Racoon heist game is only fun for 1 minute 15 seconds
43:46 New Year’s resolution to be more ambitious
48:11 You have to learn to throw things away
51:57 Features are cheap. That doesn’t mean you should build them all
1:00:45 Engineering management skills are so useful
1:04:44 QA specialists should be having a great time
1:07:53 Writing is thinking, don’t outsource it
1:08:23 Skill atrophy is a choice you make
1:10:07 I believe in people who are motivated
1:11:55 Systems are not set up to deal with this volume
1:18:48 Research agents stopped being absolute garbage
1:21:49 The whole point of the “human in the loop”
1:26:10 Dream: I want there to be more small businesses

What happens when a database engineer spends 13 years on SQL Server and then starts working on Postgres? In Episode 41 of Talking Postgres, Distinguished Engineer Panagiotis “Panos” Antonopoulos of Microsoft joins Claire to share what surprised him most about making that transition. We explore why Postgres felt familiar from the start—and what shocked Panos about the clean and lean Postgres codebase. We also dig into how public mailing lists and AI can help explain why design decisions were made, why more people are asking “why not Postgres?”, and the shared-storage architecture behind Azure HorizonDB.

Previously on Talking Postgres:
Talking Postgres Ep 39: From MemSQL to HorizonDB, an engineer's journey with Adam Prout
Talking Postgres Ep 38: How I went from Oracle to Postgres (with a big NoSQL detour) with Gwen Shapira
Talking Postgres Ep 40: How I got started running a Postgres user group with Jeremy Schneider
Links mentioned in this episode:
SIGMOD: ACM SIGMOD-PODS Conference 2027  
CMUDB talk: HorizonDB: Co-Designing Postgres and Azure for Cloud-Native OLTP, by Adam Prout
PostgreSQL mailing list: pgsql-hackers
PostgreSQL docs: pg_stat_slru (simple least-recently-used)
Docs: Azure HorizonDB
Poster: Postgres Happiness Hints

Intensely local user groups have been part of Jeremy Schneider's story from the start—from Linux meetups at a Michigan coffee shop to a closet server running an Oracle database nobody knew anything about. In Episode 40 of Talking Postgres, Postgres engineer and Seattle Postgres User Group co-organizer Jeremy Schneider joins Claire to share how community led him to Postgres after 15 years with Oracle—and why "it's like I was born to be here." Plus: the newly-updated Postgres Happiness Hints poster, advice for starting your own user group, and his POSETTE 2026 talk on CloudNativePG.
Previously on Talking Postgres:
Talking Postgres Ep 38: How I went from Oracle to Postgres (with a big NoSQL detour) with Gwen Shapira
Links mentioned in this episode:
Seattle Postgres User Group: Meetup page
Seattle Postgres User Group: YouTube channel
User Group Map from PGConfEU 2025 talk: 48 Postgres User Groups during PG18 timeframe
PostgreSQL.org: Listing of local Postgres User Groups
Postgres Meetup For All (a virtual meetup): Meetup page
Jeremy Schneider’s Blog: Ardent Performance Computing
Poster: Postgres Happiness Hints
PGConf.dev 2026: Posters from Poster Session
PGConf.dev 2026 Poster Session: Talking Postgres poster
POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2026: Jeremy’s POSETTE 2026 talk with Leonardo Cecchi
POSETTE 2026: Livestream 3 schedule & talks
Oracle docs: Oracle Database Concepts PDF
Book: Oracle Insights: Tales of the Oak Table