Early Learnings Building Apps on Postgres in the Claude Code Era
This was presented at the Prairie Postgres meetup in Chicago in March 2026. Your browser does not support iframes.
Paul Whalen
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Working With Citizen (Rogue) Developers
At my day job, I work a lot with citizen developers, a term I use here to describe non-software engineer business stakeholders who are empowered to write code to solve their business problems. Truthfully, I call them rogue developers with tongue in cheek because of the pain they sometimes cause our engineering organization, but citizen developer is the industry terminology that approximately…
Who Needs Kafka? PubSub Patterns Beyond Message Queues on Postgres Using LISTEN/NOTIFY
This was presented at the Chicago Postgres Users meetup in January 2025, and again at PGDay Chicago 2025 in April. Your browser does not support iframes.
Conflate Talk
This was presented as a lightning talk at the ChicaGo August 2024 meetup. Your browser does not support iframes.
Sometimes Simple Just Means Dumb
The Holy Grail of Simplicity is impossible to define. Software engineers spend the majority of their mental power striving to keep things simple in the face of enormous complexity: in their tooling, in their organization, in their domain, in the world. It’s not always clear what simplicity is in a certain situation - and that fact alone keeps engineers employed - but sometimes simplicity is…
Data Is Debt Too
It’s obvious to most software engineers that code can be (or is always) tech debt, but it took me some time to understand how much data1 can be debt too. In fact, data is far more cumbersome to manage than code. Software engineers deal in code and data: code is the logic that does something useful with data. Some engineers maintain software whose data is relatively opaque (say, nginx or…
All Code Is Tech Debt (Just With Varying Interest Rates)
A healthy software engineering organization in 2020 has a good understanding of what tech debt is, and why the debt metaphor is good. Engineers with any significant experience understand how implementation decisions create or reduce debt, and product managers (especially those that went to business school) understand that paying down debt must be done regularly for the long term health of the…