DEV Community: Floor Drees

What’s missing, what’s coming, and what’s worth the wait: FOSDEM PGDay Recap

Floor Drees — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 15:07:05 +0000

This year, like many years before, I attended FOSDEM PGDay. Below are my semi-structured thoughts - reflections on sessions attended, and conversations had.

Daniel Gustafsson (Microsoft) talked about a patch he's been working on since 2017, when Magnus first brought up the possibility of data checksums in PostgreSQL. The suggestion gathered 100+ replies on the mailing list, after which Daniel and Magnus hacked something together at the Stockholm PUG (PostgreSQL User Group).

The patch ended up so complicated that senior devs were like "looks correct, but I'm not touching/committing it". "Restartability" as a feature was desirable, but ultimately made it uncommittable. Removing all traces of restartability, thus removing complexity, was necessary even if manual restarts are not "sexy". Now the basic functionality has been vetted through review and there's the conviction it can be finetuned to the finish line.

It might of course still not make it (in PG 19 or at all), does that make it a bad idea to spend (some part of) ~10 years on? Daniel doesn't think so: "attempting to solve hard problems is foremost an investment in yourself". Of course Daniel, like the rest of us mere mortals, needs to report to a manager on what he's worked on, and he has "nothing" to show for this multi-year investment. That's where he highlights he works on other "side-quests" as well. Many of those prompted by bugs found in PostgreSQL while working on this patch.

Robert Treat (AWS) slightly cheekily asked Daniel if he ever stopped to think whether users still need this feature. Daniel's response: while the feature itself is not terribly important, the capability / possibilities it unlocks is the real value.

Daniel helps his colleague Claire Giordano (one of those side-quests he mentioned) with her talks covering "what goes into a PostgreSQL release" (latest slides). Beyond code contributions, Claire also looks at the volunteering folks do for the different working groups (security team, infrastructure team, etc), on committees, or by adding value through blog posts, talks, free workshops. Attributing code contributions and mailing list activity, Daniel developed wrapper Ekorre, which in turn builds on my colleague Robert Haas' work.

My colleague Bruce Momjian in "What's missing in Postgres"... did just that. Instead of talking about existing features, or a patch idea, Bruce covered why certain functionality never made it into core. This was the second iteration of the talk, having presented it already at P2D2 (Prague PostgreSQL Developer Day), earlier this year. The feedback and comments from that event and FOSDEM PGDay combined will certainly make for a super well-rounded talk when Bruce ultimately presents at PGConf DEV in May this year.

The day before Bruce met with other Core members for their developer meeting scheduled just ahead of FOSDEM. And other Core members were at Bruce's talk, with Alvaro even providing extra context here and there.

Bruce highlighted that all requests he listed are performance optimizations, with the exception of encryption (or: a community TDE solution). Some requests come from people coming from other ecosystems, but Bruce found that once they're using PostgreSQL in production they're not asking for any of those anymore.

It's a pity FOSDEM PGDay sessions aren't recorded, several times sessions I wanted to see were scheduled in parallel. But it's hard to make a schedule that works for everyone... I did very much enjoy the lightning talks (and delivered one, with Jonathan Gonzalez), meeting with my fellow PGDay Lowlands organizers, EDB colleagues, and Christoph Berg and Joe Conway, who I'm on the Contributors Committee with. A great start into the new year!

Open Source and the agentic wave

Floor Drees — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 09:58:42 +0000

At FOSDEM PGDay last week, Jonathan Gonzalez and I presented a lightning talk about how the CloudNativePG project has been flooded with AI contributions lately, as a way of catharsis. Below is the script (somewhat).

Coincidentally this weekend the project adopted a policy regarding AI-generated content, inspired by the Ghostty AI Policy (the new terminal project, spearheaded by Mitchell Hashimoto, who previously founded HashiCorp) and the broader educational efforts of the CNCF and the Linux Foundation regarding the responsible use of Generative AI in open-source development. Summarizing the need for the policy:

While we recognize that AI-assisted tools (such as Copilot, ChatGPT, or Claude) can be powerful aids for development, they also facilitate "low-effort" or "random" contributions that increase the burden on maintainers without adding proportional value.

Reading out AI generated PRs for fun an profit

Open sourcing your project, and/or donating it to a foundation is usually good for the longevity and sustainability of the thing. Provided the problem you're solving is relevant and contributors know how to find your project, you're likely to benefit from more eyeballs and external perspectives.

But with great visibility comes... the agentic wave: AI generated PRs and bots in your community channels.

Quick note on the project we’re talking about specifically. CloudNativePG is a Kubernetes operator for PostgreSQL. The project was open sourced in April 2022 under the Apache 2.0 license and has collected almost 8000 stars on GitHub to date, which tells you something about the amount of attention the project attracts. In January 2025 the project joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation as a Sandbox project. The CNCF has three maturity levels: sandbox, incubating and graduated. With each level usage and visibility increases.

In the spirit of the entertaining talk “Kubernetes Maintainers Read Mean Comments” - where the speakers do just as the talk title suggests: read the mean comments on GitHub issues and PRs - we thought we, who are at the forefront of CloudNativePG triage, could read out the worst AI drivel we encountered masquerading as contributions, for "fun and profit".

Let’s look at some gems.

“I used copilot to implement this fix as I do not have any Go knowledge”
No comment.

One PR changing 100 files and adding almost 23.000 lines? No thanks.

AI wanting to include a reference to an issue without the right link and the context that it should be managed by renovate.

AI complaining about how another AI is pinning a version.

AI suggesting to add a test to verify that a function that has been already tested works, but doesn’t suggest to add E2E tests which was the right thing to do but wasn’t suggested in the issue but in the comments. Lack of context?

AI creating a PR with basically the same content of the PR on the left, by one of the maintainers, only 4 hours later. Did the AI know about the first PR and just used it without telling the contributor? Or did the contributor not research first if their issue was already solved before submitting their own solution?

Also: why are there so many spaces?

Now these examples may have inspired a few laughs. But some Pull Requests are so good, until we find unexpected behavior in testing, and the author can't explain what's happening because they didn't write the code.

Even more disappointing has been the surfacing of fake applications in the LFX mentorship program. This initiative exists to empower actual human beings, providing them with the tools they need to grow their expertise and climb the contributor ladder. Instead we've wasted time interacting with applicants who were wholly unqualified.

Read on if you're human

If you would like to contribute to CloudNativePG, here are the ways to do so:

Look at our GitHub organization and get involved in the issues you think you can pick up
Join the CNCF Slack, all channels prefixed with cloudnativepg are us
Check out the calendar we have for Office Hours and Developer Meetings, you’re very much invited and all notes are public

What happens if someone breaks the rules?

Floor Drees — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 14:49:15 +0000

Last weekend my good friend Jos van Schouten and I presented a session in the Community devroom at FOSDEM. Between the two of us we've run a lot of events. And we’ve learned this: when someone violates your Code of Conduct, what makes all the difference is whether the organizers are prepared to act.

Today almost every event has a Code of Conduct. We weren't going to cover what makes a good document, or why it's there, instead we wanted to talk about the moment nobody likes to plan for.

We quickly made a disclaimer that we wouldn't cover what happens when someone breaks the law at your event either. Something that I unfortunately have experience with*.

Preparing for the worst

Most organizers don’t like to think about this part. We spent months planning the conference, worrying about schedules and speakers. Is there enough food? Will the Wi-Fi be good? But when the Code of Conduct gets mentioned the room gets quiet.

And it’s not because we don’t care. We care a lot. We’re afraid to get it wrong. We tell ourself things like:
“Our community is nice”
“Nothing like this ever happens here”
“It'll be clear how to act”

Famous last words.

When something does happen, the hardest part isn’t offense itself, it’s the scrambling to respond. Because:

Who should respond?
What's the right time(frame)?
Who needs to be involved?
Who should not be involved?
What do we tell the person reporting an issue?
What do we tell others?

When the answers to these questions aren’t clear beforehand, organizers freeze, defaulting to waiting. Waiting to get more info, waiting to be sure, waiting to talk to someone else….

This only gets harder when power is involved. What if the person reported is a keynote speaker? The platinum sponsor? An organizer?

But waiting is not a neutral action. From the perspective of the person reporting it feels like you’re not taking their experience seriously. Even if the final decision is technically correct, trust is often already damaged.

Let's look at some scenarios

To make the above concrete we’ll walk you through 2 real world scenarios, complete with lessons learned and implementation suggestions.

Anticipate opinions

An integral part of a Devopsdays event is Open Spaces, a type of unconference, attendees can suggest topics they want to discuss with others, no slides, no presentations, just discussion. At a 2023 event one of the topics was around hiring more women, and in hindsight we should have had an organizer or member of the CoC team present in the room, since we could expect Opinions™.

Sadly we didn’t, and we had to rely on what people who had been in the room told us. Nobody reported an incident, it was more of a “hey, someone said that in the Netherlands, women with a headscarf are hired over more qualified (men) and that positive discrimination is not right, and it was uncomfortable”. We addressed the topic on the main stage: “we don’t appreciate comments suggesting marginalized groups receive preferential treatment regardless of skills on the job market”.

Lessons learned:

When possible, have all organizers briefed on the Code of Conduct, and always one organizer present per breakout room. When short staffed, think what topics might be “controversial”.
For Devopsdays events we already scheduled a meeting with all the organizers and volunteers to talk about the Code of Conduct and other "Know Before You Go" items, one week out. Over time we added scenarios, to which the above was added. Ultimately we started having open conversations about what we could expect to transpire at our event and how we'd deal with different situations.

Global events have local effects

One such situation was the following. For Devopsdays Amsterdam 2024 we knew that global events created strong emotions in communities, especially ours.

One of our sponsors had teams directly affected, being headquartered in Israel, meanwhile in Amsterdam there were ongoing protests on the situation in Gaza. As part of our preparation we decided to talk about a few "what if" scenarios with the team.

If someone in the audience would interrupt the sponsor’s pitch with a statement like “Free Palestine”, the MC would know their line, and 1 of the Code of Conduct team members would find the person later to remind them that interrupting a fellow community member just doing their job is in violation with our Code of Conduct.

We wanted the sponsor to know that the organizer team has their conference experience in mind, and they can proceed knowing we’ve got a policy for handling with the situation. Our sponsor replied that they had had some unpleasant experiences at other conferences and they were thankful that we had reached out preemptively.

The sponsor was not interrupted during their time on stage, and they didn’t report negative interactions.

We prepared similarly with an Israeli speaker, but they couldn’t make the event in the end due to the restricted air travel out of Tel Aviv.

And in 2025 we had 2 Israelis join the team. We wanted to make sure they where aware of, and comfortable with our view on how we’d deal with possible comments. The event went off mostly without a hitch, one speaker wore a keffiyeh, but since we discussed buttons / patches with flags, we felt this was similarly covered and allowed.

Other (Devopsdays) events have opted to avoid accepting sponsoring when the company is registered in a country currently in conflict because they didn’t feel like they could guarantee everyone’s safety.

An event taking place in a university comes to mind - students are typically more active in demonstrations, and their event was likely to attract a large student audience. Only part of the venue was reserved for the conference, which introduced additional challenges when it comes to crowd control.

They anticipated friction and didn’t have the manpower in terms of number of organizers, nor the budget for external security, to actively monitor interactions.

Lessons learned

Your mileage may vary: you might decide differently, but the point we’re trying to make with this talk is that you should think through and decide on the boundaries your team commits to.

Clarity beats completeness; perfect is the enemy of done

When we talk about preparation, many people immediately think about writing the “perfect” Code of Conduct. And looking critically at the document and adjust when necessary is a useful exercise, but that is not the point. The Devopsdays Amsterdam team added language around the use of facemasks after attendees were harassed about wearing them since "COVID is over".

Your (organizers) team should be clear on the following:

How can someone report issues?
Are reports named or anonymous?
What happens after a report is received?
What possible actions can result from a report?

Most of these options come with trade offs. Named reports are a lot easier to follow up on. But they can feel risky for the person reporting. Anonymous reports can feel safer, but they are way harder to act on.

A named Code of Conduct team is an absolute must-have, ideally with a described escalation path (in Devopsdays' case: the Core team). Knowing who you're reporting an issue too increases trust. You're not sending your concern into the void.

Who is who in the zoo

One of the most important things you can decide on beforehand is who is responsible for what. A lot of conferences say “in case of an issue, talk to any green/orange/org shirt”. Does that mean they take the report, or does that mean they’ll walk you to the CoC person in charge?

When someone upset approaches you, they may just want to vent and tell their story to the person right there.

We advocate for a separate Code of Conduct team whose main if not sole responsibility is handling and responding to potential reports.

It’s also important to decide who should not be involved. Not every organizer needs to know every detail. Limiting information is also care. Receiving reports of someone being harmed is emotionally taxing.

Suggestions

Create an “on-call” schedule for your Code of Conduct team members. The role is not only passive, waiting for reports of wrongdoing to come in, it requires vigilance. You might anticipate one session that is more controversial, you’re scanning social media for your hashtag to not be associated with a negative message, and then there’s the dealing with actual reports. For the annual PostgreSQL Europe conference we have a Code of Conduct phone. In 2025 the 4-person team took turns carrying it around.
When creating your team, make sure you have a good mix of genders, employers, and ensure there’s at least one person on the team who is not an organizer. Organizers for community events wear many hats / are typically spread thin as it is during the event, but more importantly someone might have an issue with an organizer, and won’t feel comfortable “ratting them out” to their peers.

Practice makes... better

Practice is where preparation helps you make confident decisions in the moment. But it can feel kind of uncomfortable. By practice we don’t mean role-playing, but sitting down as an organizing team and writing out scenarios. Literally, on paper.

A concrete example is to write down three short scenarios, not detailed scenarios, but like prompts. For example:

A report comes in about a speaker during the event
A sponsor behaved inappropriately at a social event
An organizer is named in the report

These are all good starting points. If you’re unsure, reach out to communities and conferences in your area and talk about the type of incidents they had dealt with in the past, or look at incidents that were reported at your own conference in the past.

After you’ve written down a few scenarios, talk them through. Who receives the report? Who is in the room? Where do we feel unsure or uncomfortable? That moment of discomfort is what you’re aiming for. That’s what needs to be discussed, before the conference, not during when stress-levels are through the roof.

Practice also lets you talk about cultural expectations. How much do you communicate publicly? What feels respectful? Or does that feel like over exposure?

Again, there’s no correct answer here. You need to find the correct answers for your community.

What happens next?

What happens after a decision is often the hardest. Enforcement is almost never a clear case. Sometimes it’s an apology, private or public. Sometimes we need to ask someone to leave the event. It depends on context, and power dynamics.

Not every violation needs the same response. In certain scenarios you may decide to skip a public apology as a resolution, since you’re dealing with someone who has been challenging what’s accepted behavior at previous events, and go straight to removing someone from your event.

What helps is thinking in proportionality. What reduces the chances of this happening again? But also, what helps people feel safe enough to stay in your community? When you decide to give benefit of the doubt and only give a warning, maybe that drives others away from your community, because they do not feel safe anymore.

People move away quietly. I attended a tech event where a show of hands revealed only 5 out of 500 participants identified as female. When I wanted to report poor behavior of a sponsor towards me, the team was overwhelmed, they had no idea what to do. "This has never happened before", they claimed. But I knew there was a reason why there were so few women. I too warn my friends for events that are unsafe, encouraging them to stay away.

Decide in advance the types of decisions you’re willing to make, and what constitutes a serious violation or breach.

In what setting an incident occurred can dictate whether a public response is warranted. An incident between 2 people is different from something that happens on stage.

What's next?

Finally, after the event, take the time to debrief internally. Do a little retro. What went well? Where did you get stuck? This is how your Code of Conduct becomes a living process instead of just a document.

And gosh this is hard, no matter how much thought and effort you put in your policies. Sometimes you’ll escalate issues to another governing body because that’s what your process dictates, but you might not like their handling of an incident.

Especially in smaller communities you’re bound to know one or both sides of an incident, and relationships might be affected. Even more reason to clearly document processes, and think hard about communication.

We can’t possibly attempt to cover all that we’ve learned running Code of Conduct response teams over the years, and we concluded our presentation with some open questions:

What if you know that a participant (speaker, sponsor, attendee) breached the code of conduct at another event? Do you deny them access to your event? Do you instruct your organizers team to be extra vigilant around this person? What is important to your decision?
If you have a Code of Conduct team, do you ask the team members to refrain from drinking alcohol for the duration of the event? We do, but it has certainly kept people from volunteering for the position.

Like many things in software and in life, your answer will be a version of “it depends”. We’re curious to hear about your experiences and thoughts, in the comments.

We received the request to share the Code of Conduct training we do, and we will once we cleaned it up!

*_If someone breaks the law, you get the authorities involved. _

My FOSDEM 2026 watchlist

Floor Drees — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 18:27:43 +0000

Last weekend I attended FOSDEM (and FOSDEM PGDay), but because I brought my 11-year old with me, couldn't stick to the murderous schedule I normally have for myself. People who have seen my Itinerary of Doom in previous years, which includes backup (and backup-backup) talks for when a devroom is full, and also scheduled bathroom breaks, know what's up. Anyway, I was a lot more restricted this year, and have a lot more sessions than usual to watch the recordings of.

In case you're interested, here's my watchlist, ordered by devroom.

Community

There are No Adults in the Room: Learning how to Grow Up as a Team - Oren Klopfer, A. Salt, Elisabeth Wenger-Stickel (technically a re-watch)
Downstream Mindset vs Upstream Communities - Ildiko Vancsa
The CRA isn't coming for your open source community - Tobie Langel (Tobie! We didn't even meet in the tram this year!!)
The Synthetic Senior: Rethinking Free Software Mentorship in the AI Era - Abigail Cabunoc Mayes
From Vibrant to Silent: Has the Community Lost Its Voice? - Prithvi Raj
Headscale & Tailscale: The complementary open source clone - Kristoffer Dalby
Self-Raising Lazarus: All Contributors and how Open Source can Rise Again - Jim Madge
Building on Success: Sustainability of Open Source - Ruth Suehle
Burnout in Open Source: A Structural Problem We Can Fix Together - Miranda Heath
The AI Shockwave in Open Source Communities: How AI Is Reshaping the Foundations of Open Source Communities - David Allen, Amanda Victoria Wagner

CRA in practice

Software Supply Chain Strategy at Deutsche Bahn - Max Mehl, Henry Sachs
Building CRA-Ready Open Source Communities: The Critical Role of Community Managers - Cynthia Lo, Cassie Jiun seo
Panel: From Minimum Compliance to Meaningful Stewardship - Salve J. Nilsen, Kate Stewart, Madalin Neag, Pavel Hruza

Databases

PostgreSQL and MySQL, Two Databases, Three Perspectives - Rohit Nayak, Shlomi Noach, Ben Dicken, Pep Pla
Cracking Down the Code: What Really Happens When You Run a SELECT? - Charly Batista
Data on Kubernetes / stateless storage - Matthias Crauwels
Delegating SQL Parsing to PostgreSQL - Greg Potter
Contributing to MariaDB & Postgres - Kevin Biju, Georgi Kodinov
How to Prevent Your AI from Returning Garbage: It Starts and Ends with Data Engineering - Matt Yonkovit

Funding the FOSS Ecosystem

Funding Europe’s Open Digital Infrastructure: A Detailed Case for an EU Sovereign Tech Fund - Nicholas Gates, Felix Reda, Jennifer Tridgell
Funding Lessons Learned Panel - Maria Majadas, Guillaume Monnet, Sriram Ramkrishna, Hannes Mühleisen, Lucie Anglade, Guillaume Ayoub
Ecosystems, Not Projects: Rethinking Open Source Foundation Funding - Bill Mulligan, Patrick Masson

Geospatial

Lessons from teaching 100+ beginners to use the OpenStreetMap - Bogomil Shopov - Бого

Legal & Policy

From Policy To Practice; Open Source in The Dutch Government - Gina Plat
Unique Challenges in Elected Governing Bodies for FOSS - Deb Bryant, Bradley M. Kühn, Richard Fontana, Joe Brockmeier, Ian Kelling

Main

What happened to RubyGems and what can we learn? - Mike McQuaid
Free as in Burned Out: Who Really Pays for Open Source? - Marga Manterola
Strategy for Trusting your Employer in Open Source: a Historical Approach - James Bottomley
Open Source Security in spite of AI - Daniel Stenberg

Open Source & EU Policy

The Fediverse and the EU's Digital Services Act: solving the challenges of modern social media? - Jordan Maris, Sandra Barthel, Hannah Aubry, Alexandra Geese
Age verification: a threat to the open-source ecosystem - Ella Jakubowska
Could Compliance Costs Sustain FOSS? A Theory of Voluntary Attestations - Æva Black
Could Compliance Costs Sustain FOSS? A Panel With The Public Sector - Æva Black, Michael Schuster, Greg Wallace, Tommaso Bernabo'
Participating in Standardisation around the CRA - Simon Phipps, Jordan Maris
Effective standard-setting - Tobie Langel

SBOMS and supply chains

Deutsche Bahn's Approach to Large-Scale SBOM Collection and Use - Max Mehl, Henry Sachs
How public administrations are shifting their software supply chain paradigms – and why now - Julian Schauder

Testing and Continuous Delivery

Developer Experience is more than just Productivity metrics - Jeremy Meiss

... and the closing session too! Watching a few a day will get me through dreary February. Share your recommendations in the comments?

My talk with fellow Devopsdays-er Jos van Schouten "What happens if someone breaks the rules?" is also live: fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/NGEWWJ-what_happens_if_someone_breaks_the_rules/

My PGConf EU 2025 experience

Floor Drees — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 13:07:24 +0000

Last week marked the 2025 edition of PGConf EU. I had many roles, and I'm excited to let you know that I have almost recovered from a very busy week. Below are my very personal highlights.

There was the PostgreSQL Women Breakfast at PGConf.EU 2025, organized by Priyanka Chatterjee and Teresa Lopes, and supported by the PostgreSQL Europe Diversity Committee. An initiative very much appreciated by all who joined.

(I'm there in the back, doing finger guns, for some reason...)

October 21, Karen Jex (Crunchy Data / Snowflake) and I talked about accessibility and the Hidden Disabilities Sunflower program at the Community Organizers Conf the day before PGConf EU. I tried to summarize what we discussed in this blog.

Karen and I, and Boriss Mejias and Jimmy Angelakos, also did a panel on mental health and neurodiversity in the open source community and at work that I tried to summarize here. We were all very moved by the people sharing their stories during and after the session, in-person and via private messaging. I'm very grateful to Karen and Jimmy for talking so openly about their neurodivergent brains, contributing to a healthy discourse in the Postgres community!

Speaking of healthy, I volunteered on the Code of Conduct team, like I've done so many times before at Postgres and other events. Led by Stacey Haysler, Celeste Horgan, Pavlo Golub and I had a mostly smooth time. Stacey and I talked a bit about general guidance for organizers when it comes to establishing a team to enforce the Code of Conduct at their event. More to come.

I enjoyed this year's keynote by Karen Sandler from the Software Freedom Conservancy, on the four freedoms of open source software - that are very important to her as a "patient deeply concerned with the technology in her own body". What happens when life-saving, proprietary software goes EOL?

My colleague Gabriele Bartolini and I talked about the challenges and lessons learned transferring stewardship of CloudNativePG to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). I've summarized the talk on my blog.

Our scheduled talk was not the only time Gabriele and I got to talk PostgreSQL on Kubernetes. One of the events I co-organized during the "Day 0" / Community Events Day, together with the wonderful Gülçin Yıldırım Jelinek, was just about that. The PostgreSQL Wiki has all the info, and links to presentations and notes. Gülçin and I were very happy with the turnout of around 65 people.

The other event I ran on October 21 was for community organizers. It was super fun learning from peers about how sponsorship and different event formats work in different regions.

My employer was also a Gold-level sponsor for the event, and many of my colleagues had scheduled sessions at the event. Below you see proof of me supporting my colleagues' stage performances. I laughed out loud more than once during Boriss' sessions, and I loved how my colleague Álvaro Herrera teamed up with Cybertec's Antonin Houska to talk about a patch they worked on.

Antonin's colleague Cornelia Biacsics talked about how everyone can contribute to the PostgreSQL project in their own way. Cornelia joined the postgres-contrib.org team, to help in the effort of making more visible the non-code contributions to the community. I joined the Contributors Committee last week, by shaking hands with Christoph Berg, Joe Conway, and Melanie Plageman at the event. We really should have taken that press photo...

Like last year Claire Giordano (Microsoft) made visible in a very entertaining way all the work that goes into a major PostgreSQL release, and the nurturing of a community. I can't wait for the blog/recording to come out for this one, it's an important talk that should be standard for every PGConf event, and possibly an exercise that can be shared. Although of course if Claire wants to travel the world I won't stop her!

One of Claire's contributions to the community is the absolutely stunning pictures she takes of the speakers. Way before the official event pictures are published, you see people adopting Claire's pictures as new profile pictures. I'm happy she was able to snap a picture of (part of) our PGDay Lowlands organizer team:

And of course I organized the (pg)karaoke event. We had 35 people in 2023 (Prague), 50 in 2024 (Athens), and I counted over 60 people over the course of the evening and night this year!

It would go against my moral code to post pictures from karaoke, so instead you get a picture of a dinner shared with EDB colleagues and friends. Until next time we meet!

How to work with other Postgres people (panel on neurodiversity)

Floor Drees — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 13:06:20 +0000

At PGConf EU last week I was part of a panel on mental health and neurodiversity in the open source community and at work. I'll try and summarize the discussion here.

We were all quite moved by the audience participation during the panel. People shared personal stories and the ways they get their best work done. We're trying to get their stories summarized so those can be shared too, as we've opted to remove them from the recording to protect people's privacy.

The panelists

EDB colleague, PGDay Lowlands co-organizer, and my close friend Boriss Mejias took on the role of host for the panel.

Jimmy Angelakos, Staff Software Engineer at pgEdge, has been part of the PostgreSQL community for over 15 years and open source community for over 25 years. He's a member of the PostgreSQL Europe Diversity committee. Introducing himself, Jimmy says: "There were strong indications I displayed some autistic traits but I chose to ignore it because the depictions of autism growing up were significantly different. My suspicions were confirmed a few years ago when I found out I am actually on the Autism Spectrum."

Karen Jex is a Senior Solutions Architect at Crunchy Data / Snowflake, which she arrived at via 20 something years as a database administrator and database consultant. She's on the PostgreSQL Europe board, and serves as the Chair for the Diversity Committee. She says: "I'm autistic. I didn't know until a few years ago, and I wasn't formally diagnosed until very recently. A lot of people don't know (I suppose they do now!), partly because I mask, or hide, my autistic traits most of the time. It's a defense mechanism, a way to blend in, but it's exhausting and is one of the reasons I'm often close to burnout."

I recently started the "NeuroD @ EDB" ERG - short for “Employee Resource Group” which is basically an internal community. At EDB we have similar groups for women, a LGBTQ+ group, and the “Amigos” group that Laura Minen talked about in her session at the Community Organizers Conf last week as well.

Like Jimmy and Karen, I’m a member of the PostgreSQL Europe Diversity Committee, I'm a newly appointed chair of the PostgreSQL Code of Conduct Committee, and PGDay Lowlands organizer. I'm chronically too busy, and “powered” by ADHD, which sometimes will make me feel like I'm on top of the world, and sometimes terribly inadequate.

Challenges, misconceptions and expectations

To break the proverbial ice, Boriss asked us to choose a song that represents our "unique brains". He himself picked "Nebraska", by An Pierle.

Karen: My literal-thinking brain has difficulty with the idea of describing itself as a song, but I definitely identify with Chumbawamba's "Tubthumping": I get knocked down, but I get up again!
Jimmy: It would probably be the Nyan Cat song or Happy Tree Friends in terms of vibe. (not linked on purpose, you're welcome)
Me: the lyrics to "Free" by Florence + The Machine come close to describing how I feel. If it would be a genre it'd be free jazz played at twice the speed, by a punk band.

“You don't look autistic” is a phrase that Karen could do without. "Like it's a compliment!" I know that I struggle with the stereotype that people with ADHD have unlimited energy, and people assuming I can always take on more work.

Talking about work, neurodivergent employees can struggle when there's sensory overload - lights, noises, people, constant distractions and context switching, small talk, implied expectations rather than explicit instructions. Jimmy adds that what other people perceive as welcome bonding or socializing at work can be unwelcome distractions for him. "Open plan offices are a nightmare". As are KPIs/OKRs/Best Practices that are meant to “work in every case”, but don't account for the neurodivergent brain / ways of working.

The feeling of feeling seen

When Boriss asked about positive experiences in the workplace and the community, I shared how a former manager (who also has ADHD) helped me map tasks on a urgent vs important table, helping me avoid to "parallel-track" everything.

Karen really appreciated being asked by her fellow PGConf EU organizers whether or not she felt comfortable with a certain task that involved a lot of social interaction. "They didn't assume I could or could not do the task, they gave me the options." She also mentioned the wellness rooms at Snowflake that can be used to decompress when necessary.

Jimmy says that the fact that it's so accepted to work 100% remotely is a blessing. He also mentioned the unrestricted time off allowance at pgEdge is a life-saver. "I'll get the work done anyway". I thought I heard "unlimited time off", which I found doesn't work for me at all because I will not track it and always think I'm not doing enough even when I work while I'm holiday. And during the weekends. And. A defined number of days a year that I need to take, and a manager who encourages me to take time off, is the only think keeping me from burning out.

Other ways in which managers and colleagues can support is by having a good, current photo as your profile picture on Slack/email. Jimmy says that it's crucial for people who are not good at recognizing faces, and that turning on your camera once in a while during meetings further helps as well.

While he had the mic, Jimmy pleads to avoid sending messages when you know the other person is working on something, and to avoid using @all, @everyone, @here in work chats unless something REALLY requires the attention of EVERYONE present. On the topic, I have bursts of energy, not typically within the bounds of "working hours". To at least appear to have a healthy work-life balance (and maybe it will manifest one day?), I schedule messages to be send later.

Boriss asked the group about accommodations to make work… work. I schedule (virtual) “body doubling” time with colleagues to get the tasks done I have no actual interest in doing (expenses). Just the pressure of having a peer there doing something they don’t want to do either, but doing it anyway, helps me avoid the "ADHD tax" (also: late fees, missed return window).

Jimmy requests two sessions for everything—one at a different time of day—which perfectly illustrates how accommodating one group can benefit many others. By scheduling meetings at varying times, people across different time zones have the opportunity to participate. And people in different time zones might have other productivity hours too!

Karen asks to make documents concise and clear to read, and only include relevant information to help comprehension and reduce anxiety about what you could mean.

More discourse, please

Jimmy, Karen and I all got our diagnosis later in life despite suspecting something was "different". That means we developed coping mechanisms that work for us, but also that we've all done an amount of "masking" in order to fit in.

My diagnosis has enabled me to give myself more grace, instead of beating myself up over my terrible time management or misplacing my key/phone/wallet, again. I know that the panel sparked many conversations, in-person and privately as well, and if you were thinking about reaching out but haven't done so yet: please do, here or on bluesky / mastodon / linkedin / ...

They grow up so fast: donating your open source project to a foundation (or: the CloudNativePG story)

Floor Drees — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 12:16:17 +0000

The first commit to the CloudNativePG project was made in February 2020. Just two years later, EDB began the process of donating the project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. This move wasn’t just symbolic, it was a deliberate strategy to ensure CloudNativePG could continue to thrive under the guidance of a broader, more diverse community of contributors.

My colleague Gabriele Bartolini and I talked about the challenges and lessons learned transferring stewardship of an open source project to a foundation. Gabriele is the VP of Cloud Native at EDB, an active PostgreSQL Contributor, maintainer of CloudNativePG, and a Data on Kubernetes community Ambassador. Relevant to the topic of the presentation, I’ve been a CloudNativePG Code Owner since spring this year.

Why transfer stewardship?

We’ve seen what happened in the past with company owned open source projects, it all starts with good intentions but: companies get acquired, and objectives change - we wanted to make sure CloudNativePG lives beyond EDB and be free forever.

You’ll remember the story of MySQL. MySQL was created by a Swedish company, MySQL AB. MySQL AB was bought by Sun Microsystems in 2008 . And then Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010.

Concerns about Sun's position as a competitor to Oracle were raised by antitrust regulators, open source advocates, customers, and employees. The European Commission delayed the acquisition for several months over questions about Oracle's plans for MySQL, Sun's competitor to Oracle Database. But it went through in the end as we know.

The day Oracle acquired Sun, one of the original maintainers forked MySQL, launching MariaDB, and taking a swath of MySQL developers with him. He also started a petition asking that MySQL either be divested to a third party, or have its licensing changed to be less restrictive.

There's the MariaDB Foundation, and there's MariaDB the company which makes its profits from developing proprietary products related to MariaDB. If MySQL had been managed under a neutral, non-profit foundation, it likely couldn’t have been acquired in the same way. The separation of governance (the Foundation) from commercial activity (the Company) protects a project’s community and technical direction, regardless of corporate mergers or business pressures.

Bringing it back to CloudNativePG, donation to the CNCF prevents it from ever being a topic of discussion.

About a year ago I was exploring the possibility of a foundation to centralize support for PostgreSQL ecosystem projects (extensions and auxiliary tooling), together with David Wheeler, when we were both still at Tembo. Of course then David and I looked at CloudNativePG as a project that could probably benefit from a vendor-neutral hub-thing invested in the future development of the project.

Now, I don’t work at Tembo anymore (and neither does David), and the foundation was never launched, but the problems we were seeing in open source - single-vendor projects, and critical software maintained by a single, fallible human, or a very small number of maintainers in their free time - didn’t go away.

I watched CloudNativePG go the foundation route from the sidelines and it made total sense. Since joining EDB I have had plenty of conversations with the maintainers and learned what it means to be a CNCF project and proposed to Gabriele that we share this story.

Why the Cloud Native Computing Foundation?

People in the Postgres community might not be familiar with the CNCF/Linux Foundation. So first let’s look at these organizations a bit closer and I think you’ll too conclude that other foundations like the Eclipse Foundation; Apache Software Foundation, Free Software Foundation, etc wouldn’t fit, CNCF was the defacto choice.

The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit technology consortium founded in 2000. Its mission is to support the growth of Linux and open-source software by fostering collaboration between developers, companies, and organizations.

The foundation provides a neutral, trusted hub for projects that are critical to modern computing, ranging from the Linux kernel itself to emerging technologies in cloud computing, networking, and security.

Over time, the Linux Foundation has expanded beyond just Linux to host and incubate a wide range of open-source projects. It provides governance, funding, infrastructure, legal support, and events to ensure projects can grow sustainably.

Some of the most well-known initiatives under its umbrella include LF Edge (for edge computing), and OpenJS Foundation (for JavaScript technologies).

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) was founded in 2015 as a project under the Linux Foundation. Its creation was driven by the rapid rise of cloud-native technologies—especially containerization and microservices—that required open governance and community-driven standards.

CNCF serves as a vendor-neutral home for projects that enable organizations to build and run scalable, resilient applications in modern cloud environments.

CNCF is best known for hosting Kubernetes, along with dozens of other important projects such as Prometheus (monitoring), and Envoy (service proxy). By bringing these under one umbrella, CNCF ensures interoperability, community collaboration, and long-term sustainability.

Timeline / not-so ancient history

CloudNativePG was originally conceived in August 2019, when Gabriele was asked by Simon Riggs, then CEO at 2ndQuadrant now EDB, to lead the Cloud Native/Kubernetes initiatives for the company. His team had a long running history of DevOps practices, and had been following Kubernetes for some time.

The game-changer was the introduction of local persistent volumes in Kubernetes 1.14 (April 2019), together with a more consistent and standard adoption of the operator pattern in the industry. They began an exploratory phase: they wanted to build an operator that would rely on light images (immutable application containers), to be entirely declarative and to be tightly integrated with the Kubernetes API server.

By December 2019, they had achieved results well beyond our expectations in all areas—most notably that Kubernetes on bare metal was performing almost identically to Linux on bare metal.

Next, they started the productization phase of a BDR (Bi-Directional Replication) operator for multi-master replication, released in January 2020.

In February 2020, they began refactoring that code into a new product: Cloud Native Postgres. They published some results of how the technology was working for 2ndQuadrant and that caused the Data on Kubernetes community founder to reach out to ask Gabriele to present the project.

After 2ndQuadrant was acquired by EDB in September 2020, Cloud Native Postgres was further developed, with a first stable release announced in February 2021. Gabriele believes that at 2ndquadrant the project wouldn’t have grown to the same size, we did so many different things. At EDB there was an intentional investment.

December 2020, Gabriele wrote a proposal titled "Open Core for Cloud Native PostgreSQL", to begin an evaluation process for the release of the Kubernetes Operator for PostgreSQL under an OSI compatible open source license.

The project and the team kept growing throughout 2021. Then, Gabriele changed role to a more strategic one at EDB and in January 2022 he gave a presentation to the board about open sourcing Cloud Native Postgres, proposing to adopt the Apache License 2.0, required for entering the CNCF graduation process.

His arguments:

There was no PostgreSQL project in the CNCF landscape yet
It’d increase adoption of PostgreSQL (“Postgres everywhere” was EDB's credo at the time)
The operator become the de facto standard for Postgres management in the Kubernetes community
And enhance visibility of EDB as a technological leader in databases on Kubernetes as the original creators

He explained how Open Source IP would be transferred to CNCF upon approval, while the Closed Source IP would be retained by EDB. With support from his then manager, Jozef de Vries, and EDB general counselor at time Paul Lucchese he got the approval of the board.

On April 21, 2022, Cloud Native Postgres got renamed to CloudNativePG, and the repository open sourced under the Apache license with a history of over 1400 commits, and released version 1.15.0.

EDB formed the initial community of contributors around a vendor neutral and transparent governance model inspired by the CNCF’s values and principles - centered on making cloud native computing ubiquitous, fostering a vendor-neutral, open-source ecosystem, and democratizing innovation. Key principles include openness, transparency, inclusion, respect, and creating an accessible and welcoming community for all contributors and users.

A starry-eyed Gabriele wrote: “Today is the culmination of years of hard work at EDB, and, hopefully, the beginning of a new phase in the multi-decade evolution of Postgres and its community.”

Quoting AC/DC “It’s a long way to the top” in that if accepted into the CNCF program, that would mean the start of a journey, certainly not the end. That was a bit of foreshadowing too, since we didn’t get in immediately.

In July 2022 the CloudNativePG maintainers submitted the first CNCF Sandbox application, which did not get accepted. But we’ll get to that! In January 2025 CloudNativePG became a CNCF project entering the Sandbox stage.

June 2025 the team started the first cohort in the LFX mentorship program, with a mentee contributing the declarative management of Foreign Data Wrappers. Currently wrapping up the second cohort / LFX round, with 2 different proposed projects, the program is a way to grow the contributor base.

What does donating a project look like?

CNCF projects have a maturity level of Sandbox, Incubating, or Graduated, which corresponds to the Innovators, Early Adopters, and Early Majority tiers of the Crossing the Chasm diagram.

The maturity level is a signal by CNCF as to what sorts of enterprises should be adopting different projects. Projects increase their maturity by demonstrating their sustainability to CNCF’s Technical Oversight Committee: that they have adoption, a healthy rate of changes, and committers from multiple organizations; have adopted the CNCF Code of Conduct; and have achieved and maintained the Core Infrastructure Initiative Best Practices Badge.

Incubation means Visibility, with progressing to incubation we go from early adopters to early majority, convincing more companies to dedicate engineering time to the project.

To put in your application today, you open an issue on GitHub where you answer questions about fit, integrations, existing users, etc. The previous application got rejected, they were still using a spreadsheet back then. The reason for the rejection was that “There are already other operators, CNCF can’t be a kingmaker”.

The team disagreed - they felt the committee failed to look at the licenses for the other operators - but didn’t give up, and instead critically analyzed the feedback. They engaged with the community, and invested in adoption. Mostly in people’s extra time because of badly timed reorganization.

Gabriele liaised with the CNCF, talks got accepted for CloudNativeCon + KubeCon, Leonardo Cecchi started working with TAG (Technical Advisory Group) Storage (Volume Snapshots work). CloudNativePG won peer-respect over time, got to learn the ecosystem, and the project was in a better place, more mature, to apply again.

CloudNativePG is now under CNCF trademark, which meant EDB needed to change the name for the managed product. The maintainers governance model / best practices the CNCF evangelizes were already adopted before the first application.

Bonus of applying: people say really nice things about your baby!

Lessons learned

Here we can switch to "we", since this is when I joined EDB and got to spend some of my working hours on the project.

It's not all been smooth sailing since we entered the sandbox.
With more visibility you get more people submitting PRs, and the existing maintainers don’t have enough time to review or even triage everything.

We feel this quote by Chris Aniszczyk, CNCF’s CTO. We have a real need for maintainers that are people that review and maintain, not just add more shiny stuff. Or contributors that when they’re adding new stuff, make sure they add documentation and tests or they’re just again flooding the backlog. There’s a responsibility on us as well to make sure people know docs and tests better the odds of getting stuff into the project.

There are sometimes big feelings, and people forget that behind GitHub accounts are volunteers. Sure, some are on the payroll of a company, still largely EDB, but these folks work on the project in their spare time too.
We know that we can lose our cool too sometimes.

An entertaining and all too true talk about this is "Kubernetes Maintainers Read Mean Comments". Tim Hockin from Google & Davanum Srinivas from AWS do just as the talk title suggests: read the mean comments on GitHub issues and PRs.

We’re not the first people in open source to figure this out. This talk by Tim Hockin, again, on setting expectations and saying no, really hits home. He said “We’ve got to say no to things today, so we can afford to do interesting things tomorrow”. And quoting Solomon Hykes, Founder of Docker: The first rule of open source is that no is temporary, yes is forever.

What's next?

We’re going for Incubation status, and we’re focused on the graduation requirement to increase vendors involved through the maintainers. We’ve worked with mentees through the LFX mentorship program which is a great opportunity for us, but also for people new in the community to build up their skills, and we’re definitely looking to continue this.

We’re very involved in the conversation what stuff needs to be done in upstream PostgreSQL versus upstream Kubernetes to make the data on Kubernetes better for everyone. Then there’s the work on version 1.28, and we’re already presenting new integrations and feature capabilities at KubeCon North America this November!

If you’re using CloudNativePG (like: IBM, Google Cloud, Azure, Xata,
ParadeDB, and Wien IT already do), or implementing it for a customer? I’d love you ask you to add your (company’s) name to the ADOPTERS file, and I will likely reach out regarding a testimonial, or an end user interview.

If you’re interested in joining in the development of the project, join the CNCF Slack and find the channels with “cloudnativepg” in the name, and join our Office Hours for questions, and our Developers / Community Calls to talk CloudNativePG development and community building.

Inclusive and Accessible Postgres Events with the Hidden Disabilities Sunflower

Floor Drees — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 10:28:59 +0000

October 21, Karen Jex (Crunchy Data / Snowflake) and I talked about accessibility and the Hidden Disabilities Sunflower program at the Community Organizers Conf the day before PGConf EU. A summary of what we discussed is below.

PostgreSQL Europe, via the PGEU Diversity Committee, has signed up to be a Hidden Disabilities Sunflower member. They pledged to make this year’s PGConf.EU "Sunflower Friendly”, and they will be encouraging and helping other PostgreSQL Europe events to become Sunflower friendly over the next year.

But what does it mean to be a "Sunflower Friendly" event? And how does it help to make events more accessible and welcoming?

Accessible events

Karen is a PostgreSQL Europe board member, and Diversity Committee chair. I'm a member of the Diversity Committee, which puts in place initiatives to support diversity and inclusion within the PostgreSQL Europe community.

The committee is responsible for the long-term management of diversity initiatives and activities within the PostgreSQL Europe community, such as providing financial and other support for underrepresented groups, and ensuring that the community offers a welcoming, inclusive environment that fosters productive engagement between individuals.

We created a Diversity Committee because it is important to us that everyone feels welcomed and valued within the PostgreSQL Europe community.
We also know that a diverse community brings a range of viewpoints, skills and expertise that is essential to the ongoing success of the PostgreSQL project.

What are some of the accessibility measures we’re already taking at different Postgres events in Europe?

Slidedeck upload to view slides after the event
Talk recordings for folks who cannot physically attend the event, because they have care tasks to attend to, their travel isn’t supported by their employer, visa applications don’t always succeed, because they have some sort of risk profile, or don’t fare well in crowds
Like at PGDay Lowlands: Livestreaming to follow the event in real-time and interact in the chat, with the opportunity to ask questions
Like at the Postgres Extension Ecosystem Mini-Summits (virtual event): fix the closed captions YouTube / some external tool generate (since they don’t have great Postgres-context-awareness) after the live event, and turning the transcript into a blog post. Example: https://justatheory.com/2025/04/mini-summit-two/
Like at PGConf DEV Day 0: (collaborative) scribing / note taking
Like at PGConf EU: quiet room, with fidget toys, relaxed seating, and no laptops / calls.

What else could we do?

Speaker to share a link to slides at the start of their talk so the audience can look at them at their own device, zoom in, etc - for those who have trouble seeing, or because your view of the screen is obstructed
Provide live captioning (by a human), on screens at key points in the room / accessible via personal devices
Provide guidance for speakers to use high-contrast slides, large fonts, to avoid relying solely on color to convey meaning, use a light theme for code slides/demos
Ask about accessibility needs during registration (e.g., sign language interpreters, captioning, mobility support)
Share accessibility details in advance (wheelchair access, quiet rooms, prayer spaces, sensory-friendly areas, etc.)
Provide seating options in networking areas / during the conference party, not just standing-room
…

The Sunflower program

The Hidden Disabilities Sunflower is a tool for you to voluntarily share that you have a disability or condition that may not be immediately apparent – and that you may need a helping hand, understanding, or more time in shops, at work, on transport, or in public spaces.

Globally 1 in 6 of us live with a disability. That is approximately 1.3 billion people.

But while some of us experience a disability that is visible, many have a non-visible condition or experience a combination of both visible and non-visible conditions. These disabilities can be temporary, situational or permanent. They can be neurological, cognitive and neurodevelopmental as well as physical, visual, auditory and include sensory and processing difficulties. They can also be respiratory as well as chronic health conditions such as arthritis and diabetes, chronic pain and sleep disorders.

As diverse as these conditions are, so are your individual access needs and the barriers you face in your daily life. So you can opt to wear the Sunflower to discreetly be seen in shops, at work, on transport, or in public spaces.

How we piloted the Sunflower at PGConf EU

All organizers have followed Sunflower training ~20 minutes
All volunteers have followed the summarized training, and organizers were available for questions
Sunflower lanyards were available at the registration desk for folks who don’t have one
As well as signage to explain the Sunflower program
There has been communication about the Sunflower program on the conference social media
There's information on the PostgreSQL Europe website: https://www.postgresql.eu/diversity/hd_sunflower/
PGConf EU is listed on the Sunflower website https://hdsunflower.com/row/insights/post/postgresql-conference-europe
As part of the program there’s a Quiet room at the conference venue with ear plugs and fidget toys for folks who need to decompress - explicitly not to be used for people want to do calls

What's next?

Organizing a Postgres event and you'd like to adopt the Sunflower as well? Reach out to the Diversity Committee or to me personally! Reach out to us if you have ideas about how to make events more accessible as well.

Karen and I also participated in a panel on mental health, and neurodiversity in the open source community and at work, at PGConf EU. We hope to make Postgres a leading example of inclusivity and collaboration in open source, attracting and retaining a community of contributors who feel respected, supported, and empowered. I'll try and publish a summary of the discussion on here.

How to contribute to PostgreSQL beyond code

Floor Drees — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 08:42:23 +0000

Understanding a project's ecosystem is the main barrier to entry. I've had community roles for different projects, like the Passenger app server, a Ruby project, and k6, a load testing tool, which meant navigating the testing community and the JavaScript world. I’ve also spend several years at Microsoft, which, some of their products have a very distinct following / bubbles.

I found the Postgres ecosystem one of the most difficult to grasp. September 4, at PGDay Austria, I did a report out of my scavenger hunt.

I believe that in order for it to keep up with the growing demand as the most popular database according to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey and some recent acquisitions too, Postgres needs to continue to onboard new contributors of a wide variety.

There are plenty of people who want to contribute, but don't know where to start. I think I do, and I tried hard but my information is bound to be incomplete, I very much invite feedback on this post.

For those looking to contributing code to the project, there is quite bit of information available. I’m not saying it’s easy, discourse on the mailing list is a… vibe, but there’s certainly content available and people willing to help, like through mentorship programs. My colleague at EDB, Robert Haas does mentoring, and then there’s Google Summer of Code, other avenues. But that’s not what the talk was about.

Resources from folks who once were at the beginning of journeys too:

Melanie Plageman, at PGConf EU: How to make a patch more committable
Melih Mutlu: Takeaways from the First 6 Months of Hacking on Postgres
Robert Haas: Hacking on PostgreSQL is Really Hard

Postgres 18 had 110 unique contributors to the 202 new features. By comparison, Postgres 17 had 105 contributors for 168 features. So, quick math, Postgres 18 has 25% more features and 5% more contributors than last year. Even after nearly 30 years, Postgres continues to grow.

Growth like that doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Many forces are at play here. I want to highlight some of the ways folks have contributed to the growth of the project, without having to touch the source code.

Contributions count

Aside from my work at EDB, I'm a PostgreSQL Code of Conduct Committee member (current Chair), a member of the PostgreSQL Europe Diversity Committee, and an organizer for PGDay Lowlands - the annual PostgreSQL conference in the Netherlands. That and other volunteering in the community made me a recognized PostgreSQL contributor late 2024.

Until recently the only way to get recognized as a Postgres contributor was through code contributions and patches to core. But, as announced at PGConf EU 2024 by Christoph Berg: the Contributors Committee updated their definition to now also include:

Authoring, reviewing, testing, and/or commit patches to closely related external projects
Governance of the PostgreSQL project or community recognized NPOs
Other Community recognized committee participation
Organization and execution of community recognized conferences
Open Education
… and more.

In case you’re already doing something on this list, and you have been doing it for about 2 years consistently, make sure you send an email to contributors@postgresql.org with the request to get your name added to the page. Missing names on the list? You can nominate others too.

Don’t underestimate the power of recognition, you can gift this to someone else. Not everyone is fulfilled by quietly doing stuff in the background forever without as much of a thank-you - actually, I would argue that no-one is fulfilled by that. There are just people who can continue to do things, either because they have a supportive employer, or a supportive partner / a lifestyle that grants them copious amounts of free time. For the ones of us who don’t, a little feeling of being seen goes a long way.

If you haven’t quite got 2 years under your belt: postgres-contrib.org is a community effort that lists all the contributions by the community. That includes: meetups held, links to slides for a presentation that took place that week, names of people that volunteered at a conference, … This initiative pre-dates the change to the definition, now its purpose has changed to serve like a log of activities that can be referenced when nominating yourself or others to be listed on postgresql.org/community/contributors. Want to see stuff added: contact@postgres-contrib.org - please do, because we’re a small team and we don’t have visibility over everything happening!

There’s a draft proposal out for contributor “badges”, that contributors can add this badge to their CV, social profiles, email signatures, etc.

Why is this interesting? Higher visibility of the project as one that values and recognizes people doing work is a great development. Who wouldn't want to be part of a community like that? For folks who have been in open source as long as I've been, know that the experience can be less positive.

In some company cultures this type of recognition for people convinces senior leadership that open source work is work that is valuable and they should invest in. And that certainly is a goof thing. It's a priviledge to be able to be able to spend time on open source. Not many people have that luxury, and an employer sponsoring you spending time on open source during working hours can make all the difference.

Then there are the coins for the folks that contributed to a release: patch authors, committers, reviewers, testers, or reporters of issues. I wondered aloud to my colleague Mark Wong who runs this program whether to broaden the definition of what and who contributes to a release. But: designing the coin is a contribution too (Scarlett Riggs did the design for the PostgreSQL 17 coin), and so is the running of scripts to find all the names of people eligible to receive a coin - work that I believe Peter Eisentraut, another colleague, has been trying to offload.

No-code / low-code contributions

Let’s explore some of the avenues to become a contributor, without touching core.

Other ways to contribute to the main project include:

Joining any of the community activity discussion lists or project lists and adding value there
Translate documentation and policy (join pgsql-translators@lists.postgresql.org)
Update Documentation / wiki pages
Advocacy beyond Postgres events (join psql-advocacy@lists.postgresql.org)
Mailing list moderation (join pgsql-www@lists.postgresql.org)

Alvaro Herrara has been providing Spanish translation of messages in the core Postgres code pretty much solo for 15 years. He tells me: “Why do I keep doing it? Because nobody else does. A couple of years ago I sent a request for translation help for several languages that were going to become abandoned in a release. As a result, one Italian guy showed up, updated that translation just that once, and then again vanished. Nobody else responded, and several languages dropped off the chart.”

He would love to have people help with the message translations. Sounds interesting? The URL is: https://babel.postgresql.org You don't need to ask anyone for permission, just get started.

You could join one of the many NPOs, regional organizations, committees and working groups.

Or even, the Core Team, looking at their responsibilities, the position sounds like something a non-(terribly-)technical person could pick up. Someone with management skills could:

Coordinate release activities
Act as a conduit for confidential comms
Make policy announcements
Manage permissions
Generally make the tough choices when there's no consensus
Rally all the contributors, and committers ("hackers")

Committees:

The Code of Conduct Committee receives and investigates all reports regarding a breach of the PostgreSQL Code of Conduct. The Committee has regular nominations, and I'm happy to talk about your potential nomination - reach out!
Security Team - The PostgreSQL Security Team presides over the reporting and fixing of vulnerabilities related to PostgreSQL and closely related projects. An email address and members are listed, reach out and offer your help!
Sysadmin Team - The PostgreSQL Sysadmin Team (PGInfra) runs all of the postgresql.org infrastructure. This includes a wide variety of public and non-public services.
Web Team - Join the Web Team's public mailing list to jump in to the discussion and see where you can add value!
The Contributors Committee curates the Contributor Profiles page, I imagine they have a burst of work around the release, and then some nominations trickling in over the course of the year?
The Sponsors Committee maintains the Sponsors pages.
The Funds Group appoints its own members, which doesn't mean you shouldn't totally reach out and offer help if finance and spreadsheets are your thing. This group consider and fund things like travel, swag, cost of operations, infrastructure (email, web), professional services (video editing, graphics), etc.

Organizations:
PostgreSQL Europe (PGEU) is the European region NPO. They have a board, regular elections, and general members. PGEU offers User Group support, runs and supports events like the big flagship PGConf EU and several "PGDays". They are also responsible for the promotion of Postgres at non-Postgres events like FOSDEM. Committees you could join, depending on your experience and interest:

Diversity Committee
TBA: Advocacy Committee

PostgreSQL United States (PGUS) is the US NPO. They also have a board, regular elections, and general members. Their Committees include:

Conference Committee, running the PGConf NYC event.
User Group Committee, supporting PUG meetups in the US, the Postgres for All virtual meetup.
Diversity Committee, responsible for scholarships and other support for folks underrepresented in PostgreSQL.
Expo Committee, promoting Postgres at non-Postgres events like SCaLE

Slonik Events Canada is the Canadian NPO for the management of PGConf.Dev (former PGCon). The The PostgreSQL Community Association of Canada (PGCA) holds the domain names and trademarks (the name "PostgreSQL", logo, font, etc).

L'association PostgreSQLFr supports activities in France, organizes pgDay France, supports user group meetups, is present at open source events like Open Source Experience. They have a board and members. Then there's the Japan PostgreSQL User Association, and more regional organizations as well...

Look out for calls for volunteers or reach out to the people / address listed on their websites.

Ecosystem contributions

Previously, extension developers were not considered as contributing to the Postgres project. Now, developing and maintaining extensions or otherwise adding value to auxiliary tooling is considered a contribution. Think about all the non-technical contributions you can make to the core project, but then doing that for extensions: create free tutorials, give talks, write docs, design a logo, moderate their forum/Slack/social media, organize events, …

EDB already contributes to Barman, PgAdmin, CloudNativePG, WarehousePG, those I recommend as a starting point to my colleagues, and in fact I started contributing to the CloudNativePG project by publishing on their blog, written release notes, maintain their social media presence, and help with note-taking during their community meetings. It's a great place to start with open source contributions when you can ask a colleague for help - if you’re afraid that asking questions to community members is going to make you look stupid (which it won’t, but I get it!).

Extension developers are getting together and have platforms to get together, like at the Extension Ecosystem Summit events PGXN maintainer David Wheeler initiated. In case you want to get involved there, and you're going to PGConf EU, make sure you join the October 21 Extensions Showcase where maintainers expressly will be looking for contributors.

Events

Organizing, volunteering, but also speaking at events is considered contributing as well. For all upcoming events and Call for Papers/Speakers (CfP):

postgresql.org/about/events
ics.postgresql.life/
proopensource.it/conference-calendar/

Consider attending, speaking at, or offering to help organize a PUG.

To find events in your area:

postgresql.org/community/user-groups
meetup.com/pro/postgresql
Virtual: Postgres Meetup for All

No PUG in your area? You can create one, there's guidance in the wiki, and Andreas Scherbaum wrote a guide based on his extensive experience (with the Berlin meetup) as well.

Get involved as an organizer, volunteer, Talk Selection Committee member, or Code of Conduct team member for a "PGDay" or "PGConf".

PGConf EU this year runs the Community Events Day, PGConf DEV will start their call for "Day 0" ideas shortly, keep an eye out for that. With the venue already secured, all you're responsible for is the content - a great way to ease into organizing.

But also proactively suggest organizing a topic breakfast, like a diversity breakfast, and solicit the help of the US, or EU Diversity committee.

If you want to meet some community organizers and you’re coming to PGConf EU this year, make sure to join the Community Organizers Conf. Can’t make it? No worries, we’ll take notes and share them out.

Content and comms

If you maintain a blog or think about starting a blog, make sure you understand how to use the Planet PostgreSQL blog aggregator to your advantage.

Co-author blogs with your colleagues in the engineering department. They have stories to tell, but might need a little convincing. When they talk about their work, ask many questions to help them realize they have something to teach others. How I've been doing this perhaps warrants a follow-up post.

Help Postgres related projects write user-friendly release notes. Support committees with your social media prowess. You certainly have skills you can apply to the promotion of the Postgres community.

Closing thoughts: help-wanted

For this presentation I had to do a lot of fact-finding. And it’s an art to do that without accidentally volunteering. When you ask questions people maybe perhaps a little tired of doing the work are keen to offload (part of) it to someone else.

Postgres, like most open source projects is a do-ocracy - those who step forward to do a given task can decide how it should be done. If I didn’t convince you with the sappy quotes about how satisfying community work is, maybe you’re stubborn like me and now you realize that if you want to see change you need to do the work. Quietly, or loudly complaining won’t change a thing.

Now I’m quite supported by my employer to take on community work, and there are several companies in this space that have a similar approach. I’m wondering whether talks like the one Claire Giordano did at PGConf EU should be a regular exercise, highlighting all the work that has been done in the community (with some fun categories too - I remember the dubious honour of longest mailing list thread go to Peter Eisentraut) to increase awareness of where help is wanted if we don’t want to burn people out.

Listing the NPOs and committees earlier, a lot of the same names keep popping up. Dave Page, Alvaro Herrera, I’m sure these people wouldn’t be opposed to sharing the load.

New ideas too are welcome too! Not a lot of Postgres events get recorded. If you have the time and tools to record meetups, offer your services. Or contribute to the accessibility of talk recordings by offering to fix the transcript and captions - YouTube doesn’t always recognize the terms we use - I noticed writing the transcripts for the Extensions Ecosystem Mini-Summits virtual meetups. Postgres became "post est", Debian "Dobberman", immutable "usable", etc.

I invite you to join me in brainstorming more ideas!

Resources for this post and my PGDay Austria talk:

Stacey Hasler’s PGConf EU 2024 keynote “The PostgreSQL License Fee”
Claire Giordano’s PGConf EU 2024 talk “What goes into a PostgreSQL major release?”
Checklist for Meetup Organizers
Valeria Kaplan’s PGConf Paris 2024 talk
Postgres Extensions Ecosystem work, by David Wheeler and Floor Drees
https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Volunteer

Celebrating all contributions to the PostgreSQL project

Floor Drees — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 13:17:57 +0000

Every contribution to the PostgreSQL project counts, big and small, the glamorous and the tedious. That was my soapbox for my 2025 FOSDEM PGDay lightning talk. What I shared:

It’s nice to get recognized for your work, and it’s nice to pass on that feeling and recognize others for their work as well.

Around this same time last year I gave a lightning talk at PGDay Paris, about the makeup of the contributor list on postgresql.org and how contributions like extension development, event and community organizing, and the creation of free and available training material for the longest time wouldn't get you noticed. Code contributions and patches to Core are very visible, but don’t make a community.

A small group of community members, myself included, started postgres-contrib.org to list all the non-Core, non-code contributions we can find, every week.

Now, Christoph Berg at PGConf in Athens last year, shared how PostgreSQL Core updated their definition of what makes a "Contributor". And it is great news for our cause. A much more diverse range of contributions now get recognized on postgresql.org, and it’s easy to nominate additions to this list: email the Contributors Committee (that’s Christoph, and Joe Conway, and Melanie Plageman) at contributors@postgresql.org.

The general rule is that you’ll need to show consistent effort for ~2 years. We see a role for postgres-contrib.org as proof / or archive highlighting the work of unsung heroes, and make sure they’re… sung?!

We can’t possibly know about all the work being done, so we’re asking for your help. Please submit your or your peer’s work to contact@postgres-contrib.org.

Whether it's volunteering on a talk selection committee for an event, or the code of conduct team, a video recording of your recent PUG, a tutorial you’ve recorded, we want to make sure a larger audience gets to hear about it!

Building a karaoke recommendation system with PostgreSQL

Floor Drees — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 09:51:19 +0000

Boriss Mejías and I presented a lightning talk at FOSDEM PGDay, last Friday. Below is the script, somewhat.

You know how you often fall back on one or a handful of tried and tested songs on an evening out? The ones you know the pitch is just perfect for your voice? Or, at least that’s what you think... But repetition is boring, and you want to shake things up a bit, show that you have range. What if Postgres could help you SELECT all the right bangers at your next karaoke party?

If experience makes one a subject matter expert, Boriss and I are definitely eligible to speak on the topic. The above picture is proof of one of many evenings where we sung our hearts out. Boriss is the actual musician, I just like karaoke, and the feeling when a whole room sings along to my emo rock picks.

How does Spotify/Deezer do the Discover Weekly? For people who don't use Spotify: Discover Weekly is a weekly list of 30 songs recommended must-listens, based on songs you've listened to and liked. Recommendation systems like it are everywhere, Amazon, GoodReads, you name it.

How accurate would a karaoke recommendation system need to be? We decided it’d probably be enough if it serves songs in the same genre and same “era”. Punk in the 90ies roughly follows a similar template, and we don't want to say "if you know one you know all”, but kinda.

Using a Kaggle dataset called “Top Hits Spotify from 2000-2019” we can serve up a set list for a contemporary evening, factoring in even more granularity than genre and release year, like…

duration - Note of warning: most songs go on for longer than you think, not only the Queen classics. And there's only so long anyone should listen to a drunk performance of I Want You by The Beatles (7:47), ask me how I know. Eurovision songs are by design under 3 minutes long and in so in that way, and for other reasons too, pretty great for karaoke. Boriss reminded the audience that opinions of the co-speakers are their own.
energy - Fancier karaoke parties might have a DJ curating what order songs will be played in, but you can be vigilant too! There's nothing like a balad ruining the vibes after a perfect streak of Sum41, Blink 182, Wheatus and Good Charlotte.
explicit - With a group where you're not sure explicit language would be appreciated, make sure to filter that sh^t out.
key - You don't need to understand anything about music to know that if a song is in a similar key, you'll probably be able to do a good job, provided you remember the melody.

A quick go at it would look like so:

CREATE TABLE karaoke ( artist text not null , song text not null , duration_ms int not null , explicit boolean , year text , energy double precision , key int , instrumentalness double precision , tempo double precision , genre text , PRIMARY KEY(artist, song) );

Of course we only had 5 minutes, so we went for a pretty straightforward solution, yet one that can be more elaborate when introducing vectors and similarity search. If that sounds interesting, make sure to join Boriss’ PGDay Paris talk for an encore.

We also organized FOSDEM Karaoke, which took place February 1st, at BOA Karaoke. Proof of that evening will not be shared, but there will always be next year!

Mastodon & the PostgreSQL community

Floor Drees — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 14:29:53 +0000

In the Postgres community the adoption of Mastodon has been significant. Curious whether Mastodon replaced the bird site with the "elephant" site, and how people use the platform, we asked members of the community a few questions. Inspired by the answers we shared tools and insights that could turn the platform in one of networking and support for the Postgres community like maybe Twitter once was, at PGDay Lowlands earlier this month.

Who is we? Andy Piper, Developer Relations Lead at Mastodon, helped me write this 5-minute lightning talk.

We don’t want the cesspit of hate back, but it is kinda quiet…

Now what follows is not proper scientific by any means but cross referenced with conversations had in the "hallway track" at conferences, it does seem to accurately represent the state of affairs.

Most moved to Mastodon when you-know-who took over Twitter, entirely or not. Reason cited platform toxicity and chaos.
Yall are on LinkedIn for professional reasons, and hold on to Facebook/Instagram for maintaining family connections and old friendships.
Using Mastodon the reason you cite is to stay in touch with the tech community in general, and the Postgres community in specific.
Some commonly used servers include fosstodon.org, mastodon.online, and hachyderm.io
While you read almost daily, you post a lot less frequently...

Why?

Not enough (perceived) engagement, "not enough in my feed"
"I'd like greater support from orgs/companies, it's not a serious platform yet"
Lack of an organized topic stream
The distributed nature of Mastodon and other fediverse platforms is too complicated: "I don't know where to go"

Blockers to Mastodon adoption

The Postgres community is not known as one to switch approach or tools overnight - we’ve stuck to mailing lists and big hairy releases, whatever your feels about that. Yet, the adoption of Mastodon has been remarkable.

Oh, and Mastodon admins are Postgres users! I’ll share a link in the Resources bit that goes into how the blog author used pg_repack to delete dead rows, and reclaim disk space for his server.

Discovery remains a blocker, as well as for folks using social media professionally like I do: analytics and scheduling tools.

Hashtags can be followed on Mastodon, which oddly is a little known feature
Lists are useful but, unlike on the bird site, they are specific to you / cannot be subscribed to. And you have to follow users before you can add them to lists. You can export a list to a json file for import elsewhere.
From Mastodon, you can follow users on Threads if they have turned on Fediverse sharing, which is not available in the EU at the moment.
You can also follow users on Bluesky if they are using BridgyFed. As of end of August 2024, Threads users can see reactions and responses from Fediverse users, but not mention or reply back (it's a step-by-step integration).

Tool tips!

Good apps for mobile include Ivory and Ice Cubes for iOS, Tusky on Android.
For scheduling you can use Buffer, which is great news for me since I was already using Buffer. Other tools are beginning to add this feature too, e.g. MixPost.
Fediwall is a media wall application made for Mastodon, like in the olden days you had Twitter walls at conferences. Fediwall allows you to follow hashtags or accounts and show the most recent posts in a self-updating, screen filling grid layout. You can configure Fediwall using a json file e.g. a json file hosted as a GitHub gist. Key thing here is to find a range of Mastodon instances to search from since search is local to an instance.
For metrics both Analytodon and Mastometrics work well.

I’m happy we’ve moved to a much healthier platform, now let’s make it a lively one too.

Resources

Overview of Mastodon apps and tooling: https://joinmastodon.org/apps
"Clearing up the Mastodon Database using pg_repack" by Michael Thomas: https://blog.thms.uk/2024/01/pg-repack-mastodon
Andy’s excellent blog on all things Fediverse: https://andypiper.co.uk/tag/fediverse/
The PostgreSQL Social Telegram group I used to share the survey: https://t.me/+Fodd5AvfOX82MGE8