Thread: Re: [HACKERS] On How To Shorten the Steep Learning Curve Towards PG Hacking...

On 27 March 2017 at 13:00, Kang Yuzhe <tiggreen87@gmail.com> wrote:

> I have found PG source Code reading and hacking to be one the most
> frustrating experiences in my life.  I believe that PG hacking should not be
> a painful journey but an enjoyable one!
>
> It is my strong believe that out of my PG hacking frustrations, there may
> come insights for the PG experts on ways how to devise hands-on with PG
> internals so that new comers will be great coders as quickly as possible.

I'm here now because PostgreSQL has clear, well designed and
maintained code with accurate docs, great comments and a helpful team.

I'd love to see detailed cases where another project is better in a
measurable way; I am willing to learn from that.

Any journey to expertise takes 10,000 hours. There is no way to shorten that.

What aspect of your journey caused you pain?

-- 
Simon Riggs                http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services

On 18 April 2017 at 15:41, Kang Yuzhe <tiggreen87@gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks Simon for taking your time and trying to tell and warn me the harsh
> reality truth:there is no shortcut to expertise. One has to fail and rise
> towards any journey to expertise.

Yeah, just because Pg is hard doesn't mean it's notably bad or worse
than other things. I generally find working on code in other projects,
even smaller and simpler ones, a rather unpleasant change.

That doesn't mean we can't do things to help interested new people get
and stay engaged and grow into productive devs to grow our pool.

> Overall, you are right. But I do believe that there is a way(some
> techniques) to speed up any journey to expertise. One of them is mentorship.
> For example(just an example), If you show me how to design and implement FDW
> to Hadoop/HBase., I believe that I will manage to design and implement FDW
> to Cassandra/MengoDB.

TBH, that's the sort of thing where looking at existing examples is
often the best way forward and will stay that way.

What I'd like to do is make it easier to understand those examples by
providing background and overview info on subsystems, so you can read
the code and have more idea what it does and why.

> But almost nothing about The Internals of PostgreSQL:

Not surprising. They'd go out of date fast, be a huge effort to write
and maintain, and sell poorly given the small audience.

Print books probably aren't the way forward here.

-- Craig Ringer                   http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services

On 04/18/2017 03:41 AM, Kang Yuzhe wrote:
>
>
> But almost nothing about The Internals of PostgreSQL:
> 1. The Internals of PostgreSQL:
> http://www.interdb.jp/pg/index.html  translated from Japanese Book
> 2. PostgreSQL数据库内核分析(Chinese) Book on the Internals of PostgreSQL:
> 3. PG Docs/site
> 4. some here and there which are less useful
>



I agree that this is an area where more material would be very welcome,
and not only to newcomers. #1 is useful as far as it goes, but the
missing bits (esp. Query Processing) are critical.



> Lastly, I have come to understand that PG community is not
> harsh/intimidating to newbies and thus, I am feeling at home.
>
>


Glad you have found it so.

cheers

andrew

-- 
Andrew Dunstan                https://www.2ndQuadrant.com
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services

On 04/18/2017 03:54 AM, Craig Ringer wrote:
>> But almost nothing about The Internals of PostgreSQL:
> Not surprising. They'd go out of date fast, be a huge effort to write
> and maintain, and sell poorly given the small audience.
>
> Print books probably aren't the way forward here.
>


Agreed,  a well organized web site would work much better.

cheers

andrew

-- 
Andrew Dunstan                https://www.2ndQuadrant.com
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services