Elizabeth Christensen

About the Speaker

• Tell us about yourself:

  I work at Crunchy Data and live in Lawrence, Kansas. I am an extrovert that works from home so I’ve been finding lots of ways to meet people in person. I host a meetup group for Postgres in Kansas City. I also participate in a local Lawrence Tech Guild and Kansas City Women in Tech. I’ve had so much fun the last year meeting people locally and learning about different tech and businesses and sharing Postgres with them.

• What is your icebreaker for PostgreSQL events?

  I recently made a ‘database fortune teller’, you know like those fortune tellers you had with paper on the playground in 4th grade to see how many kids you’d have and who you would end up marrying. Instead of picking how many kids you want, you pick a Postgres version and then your favorite extension and then you find out what’s going to happen with your database.

• Which book are you reading right now?

  I’m reading a biography of a plains woman who lived in Kansas in the late 1800s and early 1900s. I’m super interested in the history of Kansas. I’m a 5th generation Kansan on both sides - both my mother and father’s families received land as part of the homestead act in the late 1800s. Lawrence, where I live now, has an interesting history. It was originally the “free state” capital of Kansas.

About the Talk

• What will your talk be about, exactly? Why this topic?

  My talk is about how the Postgres codebase works and how you can submit patches. I have worked in Postgres for the last several years and am a huge fan. I recently had the good fortune to find a documentation patch that needed to be made so I submitted that and with some help, I was able to get it committed. My talk is good for folks that want to understand how code gets into Postgres and the very basics of the patch submission process.

• What is the audience for your talk?

  My talk is aimed at anyone that wants to understand how code in Postgres is added and maybe wants to try a patch some day. If you’ve submitted patches before, or are a contributor, this talk is not really aimed for you unless you want to offer some suggestions for the next time I give this :)

• Which other talk at this year’s conference would you like to watch?

  I’m excited for Derk’s Partitioning talk. I love all the partitioning options in Postgres. He’s promising 20 and 50x performance improvements, so excited to see how he proves that. I’m excited to see more about Python and AI in Pamela Fox’s talk. This comes up a lot when I’m out and about talking to developers and Postgres people. I’m definitely not missing Regina’s keynote on PostGIS. I speak quite a bit about PostGIS myself and she’s just wonderful, as is the whole PostGIS community.