How I got started as a developer & in Postgres with Daniel Gustafsson

Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano

March 5th 2005 at 3 PM in Copenhagen. That’s the exact time and place Daniel Gustafsson’s career took an unexpected turn, pivoting from operating systems to databases. At LinuxForum that day, Daniel had planned to meet up with the FreeBSD community, but a chance session about Postgres by Bruce Momjian completely blew his mind. By the time Daniel was on the train back to Malmö, he was already compiling Postgres. In this episode of Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano, Postgres major contributor and committer Daniel Gustafsson of Microsoft walks us through how he got his start as a developer and in Postgres—starting with his earliest computing memories of a hulking steel box in his family’s living room in Sweden. Also part of Daniel’s story: guitar tuning software. And curl!

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Wikipedia: ABC 80
• Wikipedia: mSQL
• Wikipedia: PCBoard BBS (bulletin board system) application
• Conference back in 2010: CHAR(10) – Clustering, HA and Replication Conference
• Wikipedia: IRIX operating system
• Internet Archive Wayback Machine link: LinuxForum Conference Agenda from March 5, 2005 with Bruce Momjian’s 3:00pm talk about Postgres
• Podcast: Solving every data problem in SQL with Dimitri Fontaine & Vik Fearing
• Conference: Nordic PGDay 2025 to happen Mar 18th in Copenhagen
• Conference: All Things Open 2025 to happen Oct 12-14 in Raleigh NC
• Conference: PGConf.dev 2025 to happen May 13-16 in Montreal, Canada
• CFP: POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2025 CFP open until Feb 9 2025 (it’s a virtual event)
• Slides from PGConfEU 2024 Talk: What’s in a Postgres major release? An analysis of contributions in v17 timeframe
• Video of PGConf EU 2024 Talk: Analysis of contributions in the v17 timeframe, by Claire Giordano
• Book recommendation: The Dragon Book, a.k.a. Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools
• Book recommendation: The Purple Book (or, Wizard Book), a.k.a. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP)
• Book recommendation: The Practice of Programming by Kernighan & Pike
• Calendar invite: LIVE recording of Ep24 of Talking Postgres podcast to happen on Wed Feb 05, 2025 with guest Robert Haas