Ryan Peterman

It's probably like not your greatest first conversation.

But if you're like, hey, I think this part of our org could be better.

Could you help me?

leaders love that that's what they want and like so many people are afraid to do it and i think it basically makes all parties for ourselves and then last question for you with all the experience that you have now if you could go back to the beginning of your career and give yourself some advice what would you say it's tricky because i think i am a person with very strong opinions but i also think i can be more self-conscious than i should and do you think that like have more confidence that you can do bigger stuff

And that as long as you hold yourself to a high level of discipline, the bigger stuff is really possible.

I think when I was younger, basically every step of the way, from high school students to a college student all the way, I think I tended to way too often cast doubt about what I could do.

And I think that is the single biggest set of mistakes I've made, is just this repeated pattern of not being ambitious enough or not believing something was tractable.

And I think I've gotten a lot better.

That's why I don't like the defeatism in other programming language communities.

I do think it for me is like this thing that sort of, I think, you know, really could have been better.

And I think it's true for a lot of people.

I think just a lot of people, like they over-convince themselves of the greatness of other people and under-convince themselves of how much they can achieve.

And that combination means that they just like way less try to do risky things than they could have.

um and i think they like especially i think until we interacted enough people who have succeeded i think it's hard to realize like how often they're like not actually doing that much better than you they just tried and you didn't try um so i think that is probably like you know the the biggest thing that if i could go back and tell like a 20 year old me um probably is that thank you so much for your time i i really appreciate it john it's been a real pleasure and thanks for having me so

What was the hardest part of that implementation?

How do you identify the people who aren't smart?

Why did you disagree so much with MapReduce?

I'm curious your thoughts on unsolved problems in databases and what you think the future might look like.

Here's the full episode.

The first thing I want to go over is the story of how Postgres got started.