Earlier this year we started a program (“Developer U”) to help colleagues who show promise for PostgreSQL Development to become contributors. Because I’m a softie for people’s origin stories, I talked to several of the participants about their motivations, hopes, dreams, and patches.
Nishant Sharma is a Staff SDE, part of the DBServer team in India, where they work on EDB's Advanced Server i.e EPAS.
Nishant at the program kick-off in Barcelona, in the black EDB hoodie.
A bit of background
Nishant has a bachelor in Computer Science. Prior to joining EDB, he worked on the core internals of a proprietary columnar database system and in embedded systems. Growing up his interest was in Civil Engineering and Architecture, in construction. He jokes that now he constructs software products.
Because of his interest in PostgreSQL’s internals, he signed up for the program so that he could get a chance at working with PostgreSQL experts at EDB and further build his skills.
Nishant attends the annual PGConf India, and even gave a lightning talk at the conference this year! Topic: data masking in PostgreSQL. Occasionally, Nishant writes for the EDB blog, like this post, on how data masking and data redaction are essential tools in a database administrator's toolkit.
Contributing to PostgreSQL
Nishant already had a pretty good idea of what contributing to PostgreSQL looked like, so he was less surprised about the way the project functions than maybe some of his colleagues.
One of the patches Nishant worked on with colleague Manni Wood, was creating a function pg_get_tablespace_ddl, designed to retrieve the full DDL statement for a tablespace (mailing list link).
Nishant found a problem in ORDER BY, thinking it to be a PostgreSQL bug but it was not. It was a bug in the ICU external library used by PostgreSQL. He contributed to finding the conclusion by debugging the issue in detail (mailing list link).
Nishant is involved in reviewing, like this patch around saving error info to a table, and this one , which is now committed. He also reported a bug, and included a fix, but the committer decided to create his own solution. Another proposal was rejected. Despite those small setbacks, Nishant is determined to continue finding areas of improvement!
Interested in getting in touch? Nishant is active on LinkedIn, whenever he’s not playing cricket or badminton, or going on small (hikes) or big trips: he maintains a list of places he wants to visit!