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), co-run the NYC Systems talk series (1.2k+ members), run an online Software Internals Book Club (1.5k+ members), run /r/databasedevelopment (8.5k+ members), and I run a Software Internals Discord (7.3k+ 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, which in 2024 passed 1 million total views, has been cited in the book Writing for Developers.
I hope you connect with me on LinkedIn (8.4k+ followers), Twitter (23k+ followers), Bluesky (4.8k+ followers), my mailing list (3k+ subscribers), 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 $1350 since starting this program in November 2024.
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:
- Carnegie Mellon University
- University of Maryland
- University of Wisconsin
- New York University
- University of Pennsylvania
Highlighted posts
- Things that go wrong with disk IO
- Exploring Postgres's arena allocator by writing an HTTP server from scratch
- Build a serverless ACID database with this one neat trick (atomic PutIfAbsent)
- What's the big deal about Deterministic Simulation Testing?
- A write-ahead log is not a universal part of durability
- Implementing MVCC and major SQL transaction isolation levels
- An intuition for distributed consensus in OLTP systems
- How do databases execute expressions?
- Implementing the Raft distributed consensus protocol in Go
Recommended books
These are my favorite business books, technical books, and books in general.
Misc resources
- Data Storage, Replication, and Integrity Syllabus
- Tactical marketing
- B-Tree resources
- Consensus resources
- Compiler and interpreter resources
- Getting started with database development
- WeWorks of Manhattan
Videos and streaming
Other things I'm affiliated with
Who else to follow
If you enjoy my writing, go follow these writers.