Say hello to the Talking Postgres podcast

The TL;DR of this blog post is simple: the “Path To Citus Con” podcast for developers who love Postgres has been renamed—and the new name is Talking Postgres.

And if you’re just hearing about the Talking Postgres podcast for the first time, it is a monthly podcast for developers who love Postgres, with amazing guests from the Postgres world who talk about the human side of Postgres, databases, and open source.

Listening to the Talking Postgres podcast is the next best thing to being in the hallway at a Postgres conference, eavesdropping on other people’s conversations and learning from the experiences of experts. As Floor Drees says, it’s as if you’re sharing a coffee with them.

Past podcast guests include (in order of appearance) some amazing Postgres, database, and open people such as: Simon Willison, Marco Slot, Abdullah Ustuner, Burak Yucesoy, Melanie Plageman, Samay Sharma, Álvaro Herrera, Boriss Mejías, Thomas Munro, Grant Fritchey, Ryan Booz, Chelsea Dole, Floor Drees, Paul Ramsey, Regina Obe, Andres Freund, Heikki Linnakangas, Dimitri Fontaine, Vik Fearing, Lukas Fittl, Rob Treat, Jelte Fennema-Nio, Derk van Veen, Arda Aytekin, Chris Ellis, Michael Christofides, Aaron Wislang, and Teresa Giacomini. The podcast is produced by the Postgres team at Microsoft—and I have the privilege of being your host.

So whether you’re an existing listener or new to this podcast, we hope you enjoy the Talking Postgres podcast—and help to spread the word about the new name.

Figure 1: The new “Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano” podcast name (formerly called Path To Citus Con) is depicted here with the same elephant mascot we’ve always used.

Some key things to know about the Talking Postgres podcast

• Why did we rename the podcast?: Guests & friends repeatedly—and I mean repeatedly—nudged us to rename the podcast to a name that makes it more clear what the podcast is about. And at the end of the day it’s about Postgres things! So while the podcast was born in March 2023 as a pre-event to last year’s Citus Con—hence the original name, “Path To Citus Con”—Talking Postgres has grown into its own monthly podcast that has everything to do with Postgres and little to do with Citus Con (now called POSETTE.)

• Where can you catch up on past podcast episodes?: All 16 of the past episodes of Path To Citus Con can now be found on the talkingpostgres.com site—as well as on the Talking Postgres playlist on YouTube, and wherever you get your podcasts.

• If you’re already subscribed to the podcast, are you still subscribed?: We renamed the previous podcast, so if you were already subscribed, you should still be subscribed. Same thing for the RSS feed, it should just work! If you have any problems, please let us know via the #talkingpostgres channel in the Microsoft Open Source Discord.

• Can you still attend the LIVE recording of the podcast on Discord each month?: Yes! Inspired by the Oxide and Friends podcast that is hosted by Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal—two of my former teammates from the kernel group at Sun Microsystems—we also record Talking Postgres (formerly Path To Citus Con) each month on Discord—with a parallel live text chat that is quite fun to be part of.

• When are the future LIVE podcast recordings: If you’ve never participated in this type of live podcast recording, you might want to give it a try. It’s easy to subscribe to the Talking Postgres calendar of future LIVE podcast recordings: we usually record on Wed mornings Pacific Time (PT) on the 1st or 2nd Wednesday of the month.

• Episode 17 of Talking Postgres will be recorded LIVE this Wed July 10, 2024: This July, our guest is Pino de Candia—the former co-host of the podcast—and the topic will be a bit “meta” this time! We’ll explore “Podcasting about Postgres” and we’ll look back at some of our greatest hits, talk about some of the other wonderful Postgres podcasts we listen to, and of course we’ll spend a few minutes reflecting on the podcast rename (why why why!) This Ep17 calendar invite should give you all the instructions you need to join us live on Discord this Wed Jul 10th at 10:00am PDT.

• And David Rowley is scheduled to be the guest on the August episode: Since David Rowley—a Postgres committer—is based in New Zealand, Ep18 in August with David Rowley will be recorded at an unusual time for us, on a Tuesday, specifically at 4:00pm PDT on Tue Aug 6th. The topic will be “How I got started as a developer & in Postgres” and we hope you can join us on the parallel live text chat! David is brilliant—and I’m definitely going to have to do my homework on Postgres performance topics to prep for the conversation, since that is one of David’s specialties.

Let us know what you think of the podcast & please use hashtag #TalkingPostgres

The new hashtag for the new podcast name is #TalkingPostgres. And as soon as we see some interesting tweets, toots, and threads about the podcast using the new name, perhaps we’ll add some of them to the talkingpostgres.com website.

For now, here is a screenshot highlighting guests and topics for some of the most recent podcast episodes. You can of course subscribe to Talking Postgres and listen from anywhere, wherever you get your podcasts from. Enjoy!