Melanie Plageman, a PostgreSQL hacker working at Microsoft, and Thomas Munro, PostgreSQL developer and committer also as Microsoft talk with co-hosts Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia. They talk through all the different ways they got started as developers. Does making your first patch to Postgres get you hooked for a lifetime? Do you have to be a tinkerer to be a good software engineer? What is the “toothbrush test”—and how do you make your avocation be your vocation? We hear stories about dropping out of school or dropped out of career fields before they found their true passions in development and Postgres.    Some of the links mentioned in the order they were said:  Parallelism in PostgreSQL 15: Thomas’ Citus Con talk  Additional IO Observability in Postgres with pg_stat_io: Melanie’s Citus Con talk  Visualizing PostgreSQL I/O Performance for Development: Melanie’s talk at PGCon 2023 Add pg_stat_io view, providing more detailed IO statistics, committed by Melanie Plageman in PG 16   Neil deGrasse Tyson’s podcast StarTalk  From Nand to Tetris by Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken  Sinclair ZX81  All Things Open conference  PostgreSQL BuildFarm  Queues in PostgreSQL: Thomas’ 2022 talk