Jimmy Zelinskie

About the Speaker

• Tell us about yourself: career, family, passions

  I'm a recent NYC transplant living in SF and as such I'm finally able to spend some time outdoors. Career-wise, I helped pioneer the container and cloud-native ecosystem while working at CoreOS and later Red Hat. Since, I've started a company that's solving the problem of securely building and operating scalable authorization systems.

• What is your icebreaker for PostgreSQL events?

  "How many of you have heard of SpiceDB?" — Knowing the audience and how much context they have for what I do can help me tailor my talks for them. It's also cool to see more and more folks already having some awareness of what we build.

• What would you say is your superpower?

  I've definitely have an expertise in bringing up totally useless background context in conversation; maybe that makes me better suited for trivia.

• Which book are you reading right now and why did you choose it?

  I tried to read "The You You Are" while watching Severance, but I just couldn't make it through it! Recently, I've been reading a mix of work books (Loved by Martina Lauchengco, Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt) and The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli which is about the physics of time but really jives with distributed systems. When it comes to fiction, I really enjoyed Babel by RF Kuang and I'm looking forward to picking up The Wager by David Grann at some point in the future.

• What is your favorite hobby?

  I recently moved, so I'm finally able to start playing my guitar again. I learned as a teenager but haven't really picked it up as an adult. As a result, most of what I can play is all my music preferences from back then, which is hilarious.

About the Talk

• Tell us about your talk Why did you choose this topic?

  We're literally doing something that I'm sure most folks thought was impossible because we had too.

• Who would benefit the most from your talk and why?

  I think folks wanting to learn more about database fundamentals, but also Postgres experts are often shocked and excited by hearing about this topic.

• What are you looking forward to, the most, during your talk?

  The feedback from the audience of course! Online conferences are different from in person, but you've got to get that feedback one way or another!

• What existing knowledge should an attendee have?

  Just the basics of being exposed to databases. If you've used Postgres or taken a database course that's probably enough to get the gist of it!

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

  I'm pretty interested in Philippe Noël's talk about full text search. I've used pg_trgm in production in the past and ParadeDB seems like a refreshing take on a subject that needs more love.

• How do you balance technical depth with engaging storytelling in your conference presentations?

  Enthusiasm and interest. If you aren't interested why would anyone else be?

About PostgreSQL

• What inspired you to work with PostgreSQL?

  Honestly, the ubiquity of its usage in industry.

• What is your favorite PostgreSQL feature?

  After my talk, pg_xact! Prior to that, my favorite was recursive queries.

• What is the single thing that you think differentiates PostgreSQL most from other databases?

  I think the Postgres team is not afraid to add features and refine them over time. It's very easy to become conservative in what you support in your database, but then you'll slowly cease to be the best tool for the job.

• What is your favorite PostgreSQL extension or tool? And why?

  pgx is just a wonder Go library for Postgres. I don't think I've used anything better in any other language.

• What advice would you give to someone starting their journey with PostgreSQL?

  Learn the fundamentals about building databases and it'll become clear why the underlying database does what it's doing. This lets you build an intuition for designs without even touching the technology. If you're looking to learn Andy Pavlo, who teaches databases at CMU, publishes great content to YouTube.

• What are your favorite resources for learning about PostgreSQL?

  The official Postgres documentation gets a shoutout in my talk. Pgpedia is also a good reference once you know about something.

• Could you share a memorable experience or challenge you faced while working with PostgreSQL?

  I've been considered a company hero one time just because I managed to run an unscheduled vacuum that fixed production query latency 🙉

• In your opinion, what are the most common pitfalls or mistakes developers make when working with PostgreSQL?

  Not understanding database indexes. They're just as important if not more important than the query you write.

• Which skills are a must-have for a PostgreSQL user/developer?

  Honestly, just taking a starter database course. After that, I think you can go nuts.

• What is the most overlooked thing about PostgreSQL?

  It's not really Postgres-specific but not using SELECT FOR UPDATE is silently murdering the data of a countless number of applications integrating with Postgres right now.

• PostgreSQL is open source, did that ever help you in anyway and how?

  Absolutely, when you have large scale production outages, I'm often diving into the codebase to confirm my assumptions about how particular subsystems work. In some ways, I think MySQL actually shines here because it doesn't try to do anything clever so your assumptions are almost always correct.

• If you had a magic wand, what single thing would you change in PostgreSQL as it is today?

  I'm really going to lean on the magic—remove vacuum. The fact that query performance can dramatically change over time based on the frequency of an async process is just ripe for issues. There really isn't a magic bullet for this, but you said I could use magic!

About POSETTE & Events

• Have you enjoyed previous POSETTE (formerly Citus Con) conferences, either as an attendee or as a speaker?

  Nope. This is my first one!

• What motivated you to speak at this year’s POSETTE: An Event for Postgres?

  We built a cool thing with Postgres and I wanted to share it with the community.

• What other PostgreSQL events in 2025 are you excited about and why?

  I just got back from PGDay Chicago which was such a nice little community event! It was well organized and had a passionate audience.

• What advice would you give to fellow speakers preparing for a PostgreSQL conference?

  Prepare for some thoughtful folks to ask you questions. If you don't know something, don't pretend like you do!

• What would be helpful to know for a first-time speaker?

  Practice with a timer at least twice. It's the only way to prepare as far as I can tell.

• Could you share a memorable moment from a previous PostgreSQL conference you attended or spoke at?

  At PGDay Chicago, someone was able to ask a very good question about how our usage of Postgres manifests itself in a SpiceDB concept called ZedTokens. I'm super jazzed about interactions like this because it shows that folks know about SpiceDB!

Open Forum

• Is there anything you’d like to share with the Postgres community attending this year’s POSETTE: An Event for Postgres?

  This isn't the only exciting thing we're doing with Postgres. Keep an eye out for future updates from Authzed.