CRAIG KERSTIENS

psql is a CLI editor that ships with Postgres.

I’m often asked what do I think the future for Postgres holds, and my answer has been mostly the same for probably 8 years now, maybe even longer.

If you want to seem like the smartest person in the room, wait for a break in conversation, after sitting quiet for 15 minutes, and ask “What problem are we trying to solve here?”

What do I mean by trick/hack?

7 years ago I left Heroku.

Was having a conversation with a founder earlier today and the topic of hiring functional leaders came up.

A few months ago there was a tweet from @jasoncwarner about leadership skills/super powers: SQL Excel Concise writing Story telling Prioritization.

At past jobs I’d estimate we had 100 different production apps that in some way were powering key production systems.

One of my most fascinating work experiences was going through the spokesperson certification process at a large tech co.

I think back to my time in college, and I learned some valuable things.

I’ve been at dinners before with developers that admitted developers, themselves included, can be a bit opinionated.

I’ve been to a lot of conferences over the years.

Offsites an invaluable tool in getting a team aligned.

I’ve worked as a PM at a number of size companies for a few years now.

When I first moved to the Bay area I was fresh out of grad school.

I interact with a lot of people in a given week, a few in person and far more on video and conference calls.

I send way too many emails in a day.

Talking with a startup a few days ago they asked for my opinions on OKRs.

I make it to a lot of conferences these days.

It feels like we’re starting to pass the peak of the hype cycle of microservices.

For much of my career I’ve been focused on building out developer or data focused products with the customer in some form or fashion being a developer on the other end.

Often times when I’m traveling on the east coast, whether it is NYC area or back home down south I try to spend some time to catch up with various people.

I’ve learned a lot of skills over the course of my career, but no technical skill more useful than SQL.

Postgres has experienced a long and great run.

Postgres 11 is almost here, in fact the latest beta shipped today, and it features a lot of exciting improvements.

PostgresOpen is just a few months away and our list of talks is now live and available on the PostgresOpen website.

Many of us have known how great Postgres was for years.

Postgres has a rich set of features, even when working everyday with it you may not discover all it has to offer.

I spend a lot of time with dev tool and data companies.

In my career I’ve had to conduct a number of retrospectives.

Postgres is an interesting open source project.

Dear Postgres, I’ve always felt an affinity for you in my 9 years of working with you.

Managing connections in Postgres is a topic that seems to come up several times a week in conversations.

As your database grows and scales there are some operations that you need to take more care of than you did when you were just starting.

It’s not a very disputed topic that you should backup your database, and further test your backups.

This year Postgres open and PGConf SV have combined to great a bigger and better conference right in downtown San Francisco.

A massive amount of reporting queries, whether really intensive data analysis, or just basic insights into your business involving looking at data over a certain time period.

Five years ago I wrote a post that got some good attention on why you should use Postgres.

JSONB is an awesome datatype in Postgres.

It seems each week when I’m reviewing data with someone a feature comes up that they had no idea existed within Postgres.

For the second time now I’ve had to implement a system that syncs from my system of record into Salesforce.com, the first at Heroku and now at Citus Data.

Open DNS is a DNS resolver that caches records beyond their TTL if the upstream DNS server cannot be found.

SQL can be a powerful language for reporting.

When you start out as a developer there’s an overwhelming amount of things to grasp.

Notice: Much of this post still applies, but now applies more directly to Citus.

In recent months I’ve had the question nearly once a week about advice/tips for becoming a Product Manager or more commonly referred to as PM.

Marketing often feels like a dirty-icky thing to many developers.

A number of times in a crowd I’ve asked how many people enjoy writing SQL, and often there’s a person or two.

I find during the holiday season many pick up new books, learn a new language, or brush up on some other skill in general.

The headline of Postgres 9.5 is undoubtedly: Insert… on conflict do nothing/update or more commonly known as Upsert or Merge.