
The People of Postgres: Tom Lane - craigkerstiens
https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/b6f105889466
======
al1x
Tom Lane is a great guy. He saved my tail a few months back on the postgresql
mailing list when I was up against a real head-scratcher of a bug. It turned
out to be a simple misconfiguration on my part, but he patiently walked me
through the debugging process, even parsing my ktrace dump to diagnose the
issue. My respect and many thanks to this guy. Congratulations to him on the
transition.

------
zobzu
theres quite a few postgres developers that i like. you pop on their channel
as a perfectly unknown guy with a complex issue, expose it like a noob, and
they actually help you and explain to you what and why.

I find such people amazing. they don't just give you a solution, but explain
it well to you. they also seem to understand the problems easily. they're my
little heros.

~~~
moe
RhodiumToad.

------
sickpig
I clearly remember that somewhere in 2001 I wrote to postgres (-bugs maybe)
mailing list about a problem that we had with one of our server (it's a pity I
didn't find the thread on the archives). pg_xlog run out of space due to some
problem with WAL files recycling mechanism. I got a reply from Tom almost
immediately asking for more details. After a few hours he saved my day sending
me a freshly baked patch that solved the problem. amazing. I have a deep
respect for him.

------
lennel
with the wave of other db's (schema and non schema based) that have swept
through the industry over the last 10 years, I feel like a small town pastor
in my tendency for conservatism and my deeply ingrained faith in postgres.

~~~
hga
Continuing the religious theme, having been raised in a Pentecostal area (SW
Missouri), one of the things I like about PostgreSQL is that I haven't felt
the desire to lay my hands upon any of my servers and intone, "Lord, HEAL this
database. SHOWER your MERCY upon...."

It's comparable to the quality I've enjoyed with Oracle and DB2 on Solaris and
Windows in the bad old days, and has all the features I need to declaratively
enforce consistency, correctness and referential integrity.

------
NelsonMinar
I filed my first ever bug report on Postgres last week and had a good
experience thanks to Tom Lane. I was miffed there was no real bug tracker,
just "email us", and figured my report would go ignored. Nope: Tom confirmed
the bug and patched it in less than a day. Dedication like that is why
Postgres has slowly been succeeding.
[http://www.postgresql.org/search/?m=1&l=8&q=%238167](http://www.postgresql.org/search/?m=1&l=8&q=%238167)

------
bbanyc
Lane is also the former head maintainer of libjpeg, which means just about any
web browser or image editor uses some derivative of his code. That's pretty
impressive.

------
saosebastiao
So is salesforce funding Postgres development? Or just taking advantage of
Postgres' permissive license?

~~~
selenamarie
I'm speaking for myself and what I think, rather than on behalf or Postgres or
any company. I assume you are also referring to the possibility of a private
fork.

What I've seen in the Postgres community is a group of developers that takes
an aggressive stance against companies "taking advantage" of the developer
community. Companies that invest both time and money in development get far
more attention for their patches than companies that try to either throw code
over the fence, or do "drive by" development projects.

Tom deciding to take this job indicates to me that it is because Salesforce is
making a significant investment in open source Postgres.

