It was not Tom Lane’s plan to become a computer person. Tom’s plan was to be a pinball machine designer. And yet for the last 26 years Tom has been one of the most prolific engineering contributors to Postgres. In this episode of Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano, PostgreSQL luminary Tom Lane walks us through how he got his start as a developer and in Postgres—including his time working on desktop calculators at HP. And how he has code running on Mars (and most of us don’t.) During Tom’s PhD studies at Carnegie Mellon, nobody told him databases were so interesting! It wasn’t until Tom needed a database to store stock trading information that he first got to work with Postgres. And that’s when Tom’s 26-year-long (and counting) Postgres story began.

Links mentioned in this episode:

Wikipedia: Tom Lane (computer scientist)
Wikipedia: HP 9800 series
CMU CS Department Coke Machine history
Wikipedia: Honeywell 316
Wikipedia: Teletype Model 33
Wikipedia: Hydra (operating system)
Wikipedia: William Wulf
Wikipedia: Jon Bentley (computer scientist)
Wikipedia: Mary Shaw (computer scientist)
Wikipedia: Usenet
GitHub: postgres commit by tglsfdc
Article: The Mars 2020 Engineering Cameras and Microphone on the Perseverance Rover: A Next-Generation Imaging System for Mars Exploration by J.N. Maki et al.
Blog: Open Source on Mars: Community powers NASA’s Ingenuity Helicopter by Klint Finley
PostgreSQL Mailing List message: pg_upgrade --check fails to warn about abstime
PostgreSQL: Core Team
postgresql.git: commitdiff
Blog: Proton to Fastmail by Tristan Partin
Talking Postgres Ep18: How I got started as a dev (& in Postgres) with David Rowley
PGConf EU 2024: Conference Schedule
PGConf NYC 2024: Conference Schedule
Talking Postgres Ep19: Becoming a Postgres committer with Melanie Plageman
PostgreSQL: Commitfests
Wikipedia: Cutting room floor
PostgreSQL Mailing List message: Straight-from-the-horses-mouth dept
PostgreSQL Mailing List message: [PATCH] Extend ALTER OPERATOR to support adding commutator, negator, hashes, and merges

How I got started as a developer (& in Postgres) with Tom Lane