S3E2: Heikki Linnakangas, Cofounder Neon

Hacking Postgres

Today we take a deep dive into the world of PostgreSQL extensions, featuring our conversation with Heikki Linnakangas, co-founder of Neon, an expert Postgres hacker, and contributor to pgvector. Heikki shares the fascinating story of how Neon was born in 2021, driven by the vision of creating an open-source platform akin to Aurora Serverless. He delves into the early challenges and triumphs of building a fully remote startup during pandemic times, including the excitement of growing from a handful of employees to a bustling company with 600,000 databases under management.

In this episode, we explore:

• From a startup idea to managing over 600K databases
• Building a remote-first culture and the power of annual off-site meetings
• Time travel… how Neon's unique storage system enables quick point-in-time recovery
• Upcoming Postgres features like asynchronous IO and multi-threading
• How understanding new algorithms can help database management

Links mentioned:

Neon

Heikki Linnakangas on GitHub

Heikki Linnakangas on LinkedIn