The Future of the PostgreSQL Hacking Workshop

The PostgreSQL Hacking Workshop will be taking a well-earned Christmas break in December of 2025. The future of the workshop is a little bit unclear, because I'm continuing to have a bit of trouble finding enough good talks online to justify doing one per month: the best source of talks for the event is pgconf.dev, but not all of those talks are about hacking on PostgreSQL, and not all of those that are about hacking are equally interesting to potential attendees. Also, we've already eaten through much of the backlog of older hacking-related talks that are posted online. Many conferences have few hacking-related talks, or just don't post any videos (which are expensive and time-consuming to produce).

Obviously, it's always possible to continue the series by including talks that are less directly related to hacking or that fewer people are interested in seeing covered, but that doesn't necessarily seem like a good idea. For example, as far as I can tell my talk "Committer Review: An Exercise in Paranoia" was of most interest to other committers, who seem to have found it cathartic to hear another committer talk about how painful it can sometimes feel to take the risk of committing someone else's patch and maybe have things go terribly, horribly wrong. I'm not saying there was no interest from anyone else, but it was one of my less well-attended talks and the poll I ran in the PostgreSQL Hacking Discord did not particularly favor it. 

So the bottom line is that this series may become less consistent in the future -- perhaps we will do every other month, or two months out of three, or something like that. I'm not quite sure yet. We could also look at other formats, such as panel discussion on a particular topic, with a few committers or other senior hackers there to take questions and comments from whoever wishes to attend, without a prepared presentation. Of course, this is tricky because we'd still have to come up with the topics, and it's also more work to organize.

That said, we do have an exciting talk picked out for January, 2026! Andres Freund will be joining us to discuss his talk, What went wrong with AIO, given at 2025.pgconf.dev (talk description here). If you're interested in joining us, please sign up using this form and I will send you an invite to one of the sessions. We will probably hold two of the three sessions, but we might hold all three if there is sufficient interest.

Longer term, if you know of good talks or are interested in helping to organize other content, please contact me (best is Discord or email). I would very much like us to continue offering content for prospective hackers, but I don't think that the current model is fully sustainable.