Re: On How To Shorten the Steep Learning Curve Towards PG Hacking...

On 18 April 2017 at 15:41, Kang Yuzhe <tiggreen87(at)gmail(dot)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 They'd go out of date fast, be a huge effort to write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/
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