My first PGConf.EU

“Are you coming to PGConf.EU?”

That’s what Cornelia Biacsics asked me at the end of our interview. I said yes. Now I’m sitting in the Palais des Congrès in Valencia, writing this between two talks.

A year ago, I got curious about database internals. I rewrote SQLite in C. Then I started an LSM-tree storage engine. It was fun, but also a bit lonely. You can read code for months and never meet the people who wrote the systems you’re studying.

So in March 2026, I started databasestory.com. I interview people who build databases at AWS, Google, Microsoft, and more. Meeting them in real life was the plan.

A community, not just a project

Here, I found something I didn’t expect. PostgreSQL isn’t just a project that came out of Berkeley. It’s a community. People are passionate, curious, and very generous with their time.

I also met a lot of Turks in tech: Furkan Sahin from Ubicloud, Bilge Korkmaz and Ebru from Microsoft, Hanefi from Supabase.

Next: my first talk

I’m not only listening to the talks. I’m also watching how the speakers do it: how they open, how they pace, how they handle questions. I want to give my first talk on databases in 2027.

Istanbul might be the first one. We’ll see.