About me
I started my career in 2006 after completing my studies in Engineering. The initial phase of my career involved working in a proprietary database company where I engaged in various development of database features, bug fixing, and testing various features. It also involved the development of a CI framework to verify the daily code quality as well as framework to check various failure and identify many of the obvious defects.
After that, I worked with database tools like physical backup and restore, logical backup and restore, migration and monitoring tools. For these tools, I took part in architecture discussion, prototype development, competitor analysis, understanding customer requirements and maintaining a product backlog. I also led a team to develop various features for the tools and release it for customer use. Next, I started working on Postgres database, where I develop various features, fix defects, and conduct performance benchmarking.
I joined Fujitsu India in 2021 as a part of the Fujitsu PostgreSQL team. So far, I have developed various features in logical replication, reviewed my colleague’s patches, analyzed logical replication issues reported, posted fixes for them, and worked on performance analysis. During this period, I have been the Commitfest Manager a few times.
I have written several PostgresSQL blogs and have presented a few talks related to logical replication in conferences. Last year, I was recognized as PostgreSQL Contributor, and gave a presentation in PGCon India 2023 on the internals of logical replication, which had gathered a lot of interest from the community. You can read more about it here.
Vigneshwaran C at PGConf India 2023
You can grab hold of the material that I presented by downloading the PDF below.
At the beginning of this year, Robert Haas, a senior community member, analyzed the contribution in PostgreSQL development for the year 2023, and I am happy to have been listed among the top people contributing lines of code, and participating in dicussions in pgsql-hackers. Also listed as top contributors, are my colleagues Amit Kapila, Peter Smith, Hayato Kuroda, and Zhijie Hou – who will be the next PostgeSQL engineer featured in this series.
You can read more in Robert's blog post Who contributed to PostgreSQL development in 2023?.
A typical day at Fujitsu OSS team
I work in a flexible work model which is a blend of working from office 3-4 days in a week and working from home for 1-2 days in a week.
I usually start my day around 8:00 in the morning by checking the mailing lists for pgsql-hackers, pgsql-bugs, and pgsql-committers to see if there has been any mail related to logical replication. I add the tasks to my to-do list so that I can plan to reply to the required mails with my analysis. Next, I check if there is any buildfarm failure for logical replication and analyze why it has failed.
Once I finish this, I check if any work is blocked for my team and try to see what needs to be done to unblock them.
Next, I get to the regular planned tasks which includes working on feature development and/or bug fixes. This involves posting patches to the community and addressing the comments to bring the patch to a committable shape. During the day, I sync-up with my team once to catch up with the things that are going on.
At the end of the day, I update my to do list with the progress of the work that I have done, plan for what needs to be done the next day, and windup for the day.
My favourite part of the experience
I especially like these two things in my day-to-day work:
- I’m very happy to work on feature development, which involves proposing a design, discussing it with the team, addressing feedback, and polishing the design. After this process, I develop a patch with the planned implementation and work on it until it is committed.
I enjoy this because I can leverage my experience working with databases and my knowledge of end users to design and implement new features, which will help Postgres users worldwide. - I love working on complex defects, analyzing them, reproducing them by hacking the code, and providing a fix.
I enjoy defect fix as it helps me to think through the complete code with thorough analysis of various boundary cases, concurrency scenarios, etc and finally getting to the root cause of the problem, which is challenging and helps in learning new things.
Wrapping up
This year I hope to continue building on what I have done so far as a member of Fujitsu PostgreSQL team. I am excited to continue developing new features in logical replication, fixing as many defects as possible, guiding my team members to get their features committed, writing blog posts, managing one of the Commitfests, and presenting a talk in one of the PostgreSQL conferences.
Vigneshwaran C with Bruce Momjian at PGConf India 2024
Next in this series
In the next article in this series, I am pleased to announce that Zhijie Hou, a passionate PostgreSQL developer from Nanjing, China will be writing about what a day is like for him.
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