Postgres Internals Hack Week

From October 29th - November 5th I'll host a Discord group of folks who want to dig into Postgres internals: write about it, try to break it, fix a bug in it, or improve the docs.

Basically, a support group for people who want to figure this stuff out together.

Learn or contribute

If all we do is get more folks looking at Postgres code, building it, and trying out tweaks to it -- without any contributions merged -- I'd see it as a success. If the week produces any new contributions merged into Postgres, fantastic.

Existing Postgres contributors are welcome to join.

Be respectful

In order to cut down on mod effort and the likelihood of this turning into the worst of Hacktoberfest, I'm going to limit invites to Discord to folks who have been programmers for a bit and can provide social proof such as a GitHub, LinkedIn, or technical website.

It is imperative to be respectful of open-source maintainers. And folks caught doing otherwise will get booted from the Discord.

Once and done

After November 5th the Discord will be deleted. Any contributions made to Postgres (docs, bug fixes, etc.) will be noted on this page afterward, as will any non-trivial blog posts or GitHub projects showing something interesting about Postgres (created during the course of the event).

I'll also add to this page resources folks share for Postgres internals and contributing to Postgres.

Sign up here and I'll email you an invite to Discord.

Signups are now closed! Join us another time! :)

Ideas

• Read through docs of a new feature. Try out the new feature. Note missing or confusing parts.
• Figure out how to write Postgres extensions in your favorite language.
• Add a new Postgres storage backend via Table Access Methods.
• Write about Postgres's WAL format.
• Build a CDC implementation on top of Postgres's WAL.
• Figure out how to write a new builtin function or extend Postgres's syntax (not for the sake of getting this merged necessarily).

Resources

Postgres internals resources that were shared during the week.

• So, you want to be a (Postgres) developer?
• Waiting for Postgres 16: Cumulative I/O statistics with pg_stat_io
• pg_walinspect: low-level WAL inspection
• How does Postgres actually work?
• Introduction to hacking Postgres
• Postgres extension tutorial
• Postgres test frameworks
• Pluggable table access methods

Productions

Projects and posts that came out during, or as a result of, the week.

• pg_experiments, Part 1: Modifying operator logic
• pgext: a bare minimum Postgres extension
• Non Local Jumps with setjmp and longjmp
• PostgreSQL IO Visibility: #wehack PostgreSQL Internals and pg_stat_io
• Writing a storage engine for Postgres: an in-memory Table Access Method
• pg_experiments, Part 2: Adding a new data type
• An example of a minimal working Postgres hook