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Phil Eaton

Hey! I'm Phil (he/him). In the past I've been a developer, a manager, and a cofounder. At companies as large as Oracle and as small as TigerBeetle. Today I'm a staff engineer working on Postgres products at EnterpriseDB.

I am a college dropout (not by choice; stay in school!) and for the last 10 years I've chased my way down the software stack starting from humble beginnings with the venerable jQuery and PHP.

I try to practice healthy obsession.

To that end, I run the NYC Systems Coffee Club (400+ members), NYC Systems at Night (100+ members), co-run the NYC Systems talk series (1.1k+ members), run an online Software Internals Book Club (1.3k+ members), and I run a Software Internals Discord (7k+ members) that has, among other things, become a home for database and distributed systems developers.

I play a good deal of volleyball in NYC, keep trying to cook new dishes, and love to read.

My writing has been cited in the book Writing for Developers.

I hope you connect with me on LinkedIn (8k+ followers), Twitter (22k+ followers), Bluesky (4.6k+ followers), or over email.

Chatting and fundraising

I absolutely love to meet people. If you ever want to catch up, here's a little page to help me out with scheduling.

I go out of my way to chat with folks who donate $100 to educational non-profits (details on that page) and I've raised a humble $1250 since starting this program in November 2024.

I occasionally share a public response to interesting questions I receive (and anonymize).

Banh Mi on me

If you're working on a PhD, you're a postdoc, or you're pre-tenure faculty, visiting NYC, I'll buy you lunch (has to be Banh Mi) if we can talk about your work and interests! It doesn't have to be related to computer science. Email me when you'll be around.

The list has included women and men from:

Recommendations and favorites

Videos and streaming

Other things I'm affiliated with