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