Living on the Edge
I’ve been somewhat tight-lipped about my job hunt, but not through any particular desire to obfuscate. No, I’ve just been laying low because I caught Covid right before Christmas and spent the last couple weeks recuperating. Just my luck, getting sick again so soon after whatever got me following Thanksgiving, and effectively missing the holidays as a consequence. Still, I had an informal offer before being incapacitated, so I only had to worry about recovering.
The Edge of Postgres
During my tenure at EDB, I spent some time working with Dave Page for a couple of side projects related to performance benchmarking various Postgres tunables and hardware configurations. That work fueled several blog posts from both of us, and produced a very informal Ansible testing framework. That work unexpectedly helped us quantify the massive benefit to increasing max_wal_size compared to shared_buffers, and I’ve used it as a reference model ever since.
It turns out that Dave also absconded from EDB some time after I left in March. Similarly to how Tom Kincaid looked me up once he joined 2ndQuadrant, Dave gave me a call after he joined pgEdge. Through some kind of ridiculous cosmic serendipity, I left Tembo at almost precisely the right time to catch his interest. A few Zoom calls later, and I was in.
Interviewing during the holidays isn’t exactly convenient, but it was an informal affair. PgEdge is a distributed Multi-Master Postgres solution similar to EDB Postgres Distributed (formerly BDR by 2ndQuadrant). I spent a lot of time during my tenure at 2ndQuadrant designing distributed architecture deployments, and I even devised a new HA system to accommodate the specific requirements of that type of cluster. I’ve given conference talks on various aspects of distributed Postgres clusters, from design considerations to conflict management techniques. They’re not functionally analogous products, but there’s sufficient overlap that I’m an excellent fit in the organization.
2ndQuadrant really is the gift that keeps on giving, and I have yet another thing to thank Simon Riggs for. My friend Gabriele Bartolini penned a lengthy and heartfelt tribute to Simon following his untimely death. I didn’t know Simon nearly as well as Gabriele did, but his impact on my life continues to this day and I would be remiss not to acknowledge his lasting influence.
Plans for 2025
I still intend to start an LLC this year. I have a name picked out, know where to file all of the paperwork, and where to obtain the other services I’ll need. I’ve gotten my basement servers online once again following a short SNAFU with a faulty UPS. That gives me an experiment zone and base of operations, and that’s all I’ll need to get going.
What will I do? Just side consulting, an occasional training, and it will facilitate putting a more formal front-end on my Postgres shenanigans. I’ll move all of my Postgres content over to the dedicated domain like I should have done years ago. My PG Phriday articles kinda outgrew my blog some time in the last decade, and I’d like to start posting more “evergreen” content like guides and tutorials as well.
I’m just a one-man shop, and that’s all it will ever be; I’m no founder or investor. Let’s just say my short stint at a startup has made me slightly more tolerant of moderate amounts of risk. It’s something to do, and I love building cool shit with Postgres. My next personal project will be formalizing petabyte-scale architectures with Postgres because I’ve run across at least three different companies with that requirement. I can even test initial designs with my 48TB system!
Regardless, the year is starting out on excellent footing. Here’s hoping that momentum carries on through the next few years!
Until Tomorrow