Last month I completed my first year at EnterpriseDB. I'm on the team that built and maintains pglogical and who, over the years, contributed a good chunk of the logical replication functionality that exists in community Postgres. Most of my work, our work, is in C and Rust with tests in Perl and Python. Our focus these days is a descendant of pglogical called Postgres Distributed which supports replicating DDL, tunable consistency across the cluster, etc. This post is about how I got here. Black boxes I was a web developer from 2014-2021†. I wrote JavaScript and HTML and CSS and whatever server-side language: Python or Go or PHP. I was a hands-on engineering manager from 2017-2021. I was pretty clueless about databases and indeed database knowledge was not a serious part of any interview I did. Throughout that time (2014-2021) I wanted to move my career forward as quickly as possible so I spent much of my free time doing educational projects and writing about them on this blog (or previous incarnations of it). I learned how to write primitive HTTP servers, how to write little parsers and interpreters and compilers. It was a virtuous cycle because the internet (Hacker News anyway) liked reading these posts and I wanted to learn how the black boxes worked. But I shied away from data structures and algorithms (DSA) because they seemed complicated and useless to the work that I did. That is, until 2020 when an inbox page I built started loading more and more slowly as the inbox grew. My coworker pointed me at Use The Index, Luke and the DSA scales fell from my eyes. I wanted to understand this new black box so I built a little in-memory SQL database with support for indexes. I'm a college dropout so even while I was interested in compilers and interpreters earlier in my career I never dreamed I could get a job working on them. Only geniuses and PhDs did that work and I was neither. The idea of working on a database felt the same. However, I could work on little database side projects like I had done before on other topics, so I did. Or a series of explorations of Raft implementations, others' and my own. Startups From 2021-2023 I tried to start a company and when that didn't pan out I joined TigerBeetle as a cofounder to work on marketing and community. It was during this time I started the Software Internals Discord and /r/databasedevelopment which have since kind of exploded in popularity among professionals and academics in database and distributed systems. TigerBeetle was my first job at a database company, and while I contributed bits of code I was not a developer there. It was a way into the space. And indeed it was an incredible learning experience both on the cofounder side and on the database side. I wrote articles with King and Joran that helped teach and affirm for myself the basics of databases and consensus-based distributed systems. Holding out When I left TigerBeetle in 2023 I was still not sure if I could get a job as an actual database developer. My network had exploded since 2021 (when I started my own company that didn't pan out) so I had no trouble getting referrals at database companies. But my background kept leading hiring managers to suggest putting me on cloud teams doing orchestration in Go around a database rather than working on the database itself. I was unhappy with this type-casting so I held out while unemployed and continued to write posts and host virtual hackweeks messing with Postgres and MySQL. I started the first incarnation of the Software Internals Book Club during this time, reading Designing Data Intensive Applications with 5-10 other developers in Bryant Park. During this time I also started the NYC Systems Coffee Club. Postgres After about four months of searching I ended up with three good offers, all to do C and Rust development on Postgres (extensions) as an individual contributor. Working on extensions might sound like the definition of not-sexy, but Postgres APIs are so loosely abstracted it's really as if you're working on Postgres itself. You can mess with almost anything in Postgres so you have to be very aware of what you're doing. And when you can't mess with something in Postgres because an API doesn't yet exist, companies have the tendency to just fork Postgres so they can. (This tendency isn't specific to Postgres, almost every open-source database company seems to have a long-running internal fork or two of the database.) EnterpriseDB Two of the three offers were from early-stage startups and after more than 3 years being part of the earliest stages of startups I was happy for a break. But the third offer was from one of the biggest contributors to Postgres, a 20-year old company called EnterpriseDB. (You can probably come up with different rankings of companies using different metrics so I'm only saying EnterpriseDB is one of the biggest contributors.) It seemed like the best place to be to learn a lot and contribute something meaningful. My coworkers are a mix of Postgres veterans (people who contributed the WAL to Postgres, who contributed MVCC to Postgres, who contributed logical decoding and logical replication, who contributed parallel queries; the list goes on and on) but also my developer-coworkers are people who started at EnterpriseDB on technical support, or who were previously Postgres administrators. It's quite a mix. Relatively few geniuses or PhDs, despite what I used to think, but they certainly work hard and have hard-earned experience. Anyway, I've now been working at EnterpriseDB for over a year so I wanted to share this retrospective. I also wanted to cover what it's like coming from engineering management and founding companies to going back to being an individual contributor. (Spoiler: incredibly enjoyable.) But it has been hard enough to make myself write this much so I'm calling it a day. :) I wrote a post about the winding path I took from web developer to database developer over 10 years. pic.twitter.com/tf8bUDRzjV — Phil Eaton (@eatonphil) February 15, 2025 † From 2011-2014 I also did contract web development but this was part-time while I was in school.

I have the fortune to review a few important blog posts every year and the biggest value I add is to call out sentences or sections that make no sense. It is quite simple and you can do it too. Without clarity only those at your company in marketing and sales (whose job it is to work with what they get) will give you the courtesy of a cursory read and a like on LinkedIn. This is all that most corporate writing achieves. It is the norm and it is understandable. But if you want to reach an audience beyond those folks, you have to make sure you're not writing nonsense. And you, as reviewer and editor, have the chance to call out nonsense if you can get yourself to recognize it. Immune to nonsense But especially when editing blog posts at work, it is easy to gloss over things that make no sense because we are so constantly bombarded by things that make no sense. Maybe it's buzzwords or cliches, or simply lack of rapport. We become immune to nonsense. And even worse, without care, as we become more experienced, we become more fearful to say "I have no idea what you are talking about". We're afraid to look incompetent by admitting our confusion. This fear is understandable, but is itself stupid. And I will trust you to deal with this on your own. Read it out loud So as you review a post, read it out loud to yourself. And if you find yourself saying "what on earth are you talking about", add that as a comment as gently as you feel you should. It is not offensive to say this (depending on how you say it). It is surely the case that the author did not know they were making no sense. It is worse to not mention your confusion and allow the author to look like an idiot or a bore. Once you can call out what does not make sense to you, then read the post again and consider what would not make sense to someone without the context you have. Someone outside your company. Of course you need to make assumptions about the audience to a degree. It is likely your customers or prospects you have in mind. Not your friends or family. With the audience you have in mind, would what you're reading make any sense? Has the author given sufficient background or introduced relevant concepts before bringing up something new? Again this is a second step though. The first step is to make sure that the post makes sense to you. In almost every draft I read, at my company or not, there is something that does not make sense to me. Do two paragraphs need to be reordered because the first one accidentally depended on information mentioned in the second? Are you making ambiguous use of pronouns? And so on. In closing Clarity on its own will put you in the 99th percentile of writing. Beyond that it definitely still matters if you are compelling and original and whatnot. But too often it seems we focus on being exciting rather than being clear. But it doesn't matter if you've got something exciting if it makes no sense to your reader. This sounds like mundane guidance, but I have reviewed many posts that were reviewed by other people and no one else called out nonsense. I feel compelled to mention how important it is. Wrote a new post on the most important, and perhaps least done, thing you can do while reviewing a blog post: edit for clarity. pic.twitter.com/ODblOUzB3g — Phil Eaton (@eatonphil) January 29, 2025

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