Andrew Atkinson: 🎙️ Hacking Postgres 🐘 Podcast - Season 2, Ep. 1 - Andrew Atkinson

Recently I joined Ry Walker, CEO of Tembo, as a guest on the Hacking Postgres podcast. Hacking Postgres has had a lot of great Postgres contributors as guests on the show, so I was honored to be a part of it being that my contributions are more in the form of developer education and advocacy. Ry asked me about when I got started with PostgreSQL and what my role looks like today. PostgreSQL Origin Ry has also been a Ruby on Rails programmer, so that was a fun background we shared. We both started on early versions of Ruby on Rails in the 2000s, and were also early users of Heroku in the late 2000s. Since PostgreSQL was the default DB for Rails apps deployed on Heroku, for many Rails programmers it was the first time they used PostgreSQL. Heroku valued the fit and finish of their hosted platform offering, and provided best in class documentation and developer experience as a cutting edge platform as a service (PaaS). The popularity of that platform helped grow the use of PostgreSQL amongst Rails programmers even beyond Heroku. For me, Heroku was where I really started using PostgreSQL and learning about some of the performance optimization tactics “basics” as a web app developer. Meeting The Tembo Team Besides Ry, I’ve also had the chance to meet more folks from Tembo. Adam Hendel is a founding engineer and also based here in Minnesota. I also met Samay Sharma, PostgreSQL contributor and now CTO of Tembo, at PGConf NYC 2023 last Fall. While not an employee or affiliated with the company at all, it’s been interesting to track what they’re up to, and get little glimpses into starting up a whole company that’s focused on leveraging the power and extensibility of PostgreSQL. If you’d like to learn more about Adam’s background, Adam was the guest for Season 1, Episode 2 of Hacking Postgres, which you can find here: https://tembo.io/blog/hacking-postgres-ep2 Using PostgreSQL with Ruby on Rails Apps Ruby on Rails as a web development framework has great support via the ORM - [...]