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**Pete Naylor:** Oh, gosh... |
**Autumn Nash:** Because you had a lot. |
**Pete Naylor:** The early job at Northwest Net was super-cool. That was a relatively small team of super-smart people, and it was all groundbreaking work. Yeah, I think that's probably still my favorite. |
**Justin Garrison:** I find it funny for myself, looking back on -- like, one of the the best roles I had was being a manager of like a help desk team. We were just like front line support. And it's super-small scale when you think about it. We were just helping people do laptops and printers and whatnot. But like bein... |
**Autumn Nash:** I think people is one of the most important parts of a job. Having good people and working with good people, and smart people, and getting to solve problems together is like my favorite thing about tech. |
**Pete Naylor:** Yeah. Ultimately, that's how it is for me, too. You go through a whole career in this, and you look back, and it's the people. It's the people that made the difference. And I think maybe, going back to me wanting to be a volunteer firefighter and EMT, and doing all of those things I did, to me it's the... |
**Autumn Nash:** How do you think that your other activities, like the rescue and the helping people part - how do you think that influences your tech career? I think it makes you much better with people. I think a lot of people who are very technical aren't as good with other humans, and people, and seeing like a cust... |
**Pete Naylor:** I mean, maybe it's helped me a little bit to kind of be patient with people. When you're working with people, you're in a team, it's stressful, and it's very easy to forget that everybody has their own problems they're working through. If you're a firefighter, for example, it's a huge honor that in the... |
**Autumn Nash:** \[40:14\] Dude, I have the best Pete story ever. So I was going through A/B's, which is like this thing where you get -- it's like the worst SA call you can have, but they test you to make sure you survive it, you know... And I went through a bunch, and we had this one like super-fancy principal, fancy... |
I think that you bring so much technological like know-how, and like just experience... Like, you watched the like Internet like born, and you saw it from like where it started to where we are now... But you also bring so much like empathy to tech. And I think that makes you much more different than most people with th... |
**Pete Naylor:** Wow. You make me feel pretty good. But I have to say -- |
**Autumn Nash:** I am one of your biggest fans. Like, if there was a fan club, I'd be the president. You made so much impact on my life and my career... You are good peoples. |
**Pete Naylor:** Thank you. Well, when I first started working with you I'd heard about this program, but it was kind of optional. It was like a mass email sent to everybody, "Hey, we're trying to --" It was the Military Spouses program, I think. And I was involved in the fire department, and doing all that kind of thi... |
**Autumn Nash:** It was so intimidating being with people that were like -- they've been doing something for like 20 to 40 years, and you're like the new kid... And it was so nice to have like kind people. |
**Break**: \[43:04\] |
**Autumn Nash:** What are you doing now? Tell us about your new company and what you're doing. |
**Pete Naylor:** So I had a year off at a little tiny startup between Amazon... Because by the time I finished up at Amazon, I just thought "This is really feeling kind of standard big corporate America." I wasn't feeling as driven by the LPs anymore. So I gave up on that, and I went to the direct opposite. I went to a... |
**Autumn Nash:** That's actually true. |
**Pete Naylor:** And it's databases, right? It's databases. So I thought "Well, I can give that a try." And I was an SA again at a little startup, and I kind of had both options in mind when I thought what I wanted to do, but I ended up taking a product role. |
Yeah, the company I'm at now has been around a really long time, and actually pays many of the engineers that contribute probably most of the changes that happen in Postgres. So that's super-cool to see. It's a little bit like when I was at AWS and I could literally go drop in on principal engineers and like ask them a... |
**Autumn Nash:** Yeah, that makes sense. |
**Pete Naylor:** And this is another little shift that I know is going to be interesting for Justin, because I've seen some of the things that he's been posting, and... You know, when I was an SA, while I saw what really worked super-well for Amazon and for a lot of other bigger companies or whatever, there was always ... |
\[49:53\] So a lot of the stuff that we're working on at the moment is trying to give people flexibility around where you actually want to run this stuff, and have a nice experience that's easy everywhere. One of the things that I saw at AWS was - there was DynamoDB, there was Aurora, and some of these things... But ov... |
**Justin Garrison:** You've been in technology long enough to see those pendulum swing of just "Oh, everything should be single-purpose and finely-tuned to this use case", and then swinging back to "Actually, those can all just be plugins, the general purpose thing over here." And like that keeps going back and forth, ... |
**Pete Naylor:** Absolutely. It's kind of like this hype cycle thing. Once you've been around it long enough, it's like, every new one, you're like "Well, there's probably some element of truth to this, but..." Almost any time you start to take some approach where you say there's absolutes, it's all this way, and it sh... |
**Justin Garrison:** For most things that I've looked at in the past, it's always like "How does this relate to something we had before? And what problem were they trying to solve then and what problem are they trying to solve now? And are those the same things, or are they different things? Does this new thing have to... |
In your career, what's something that you think that maybe was one of those bad decisions you made about "Oh, we picked a technology or we tried to implement it in a certain way that maybe wasn't the right decision"? |
**Pete Naylor:** Well, I think continuing on with the whole purpose-built databases story, at some point there were really valuable things. There were things that made sense. And it almost got to a point where, I don't know, the database leadership was like "Well, we're going to create all of these pigeonholes, all the... |
And the other part of the story that I didn't really like was it was always a story with like "We've got all of these dozens of choices, and you need these different things, different query patterns fulfilled... Just link five of these together, and shuffle all the data back and forth between them." And it was like, "Y... |
Even the whole NoSQL thing. I think there's incredible value in what DynamoDB has done... And it still has certain strengths, niches that make it the best choice for certain things. But in the fullness of time, I just came to realize that this NoSQL concept was maybe more confusing than anything, because... I like to t... |
**Autumn Nash:** A not Camry... |
**Pete Naylor:** You can say, "Well, this is NoSQL", but there's like -- I don't know how many different variations on that. And they're all very, very different. So I'd rather just say database. And by the way, it has these properties that maybe can solve your problem. |
**Justin Garrison:** \[54:09\] I think your point also on like compatibility, API compatibility, with "Oh yeah, we're wire-compatible with that other database" causes so much extra confusion. Because you're like "Oh, should I use it like that other database?" And like "Actually, no. Not at all. But you can send us the ... |
**Pete Naylor:** And is it ever really wire-compatible? Is it ever truly all the way there? It's never going to be. |
**Justin Garrison:** No. There's always this edge case, like "Not that one, though." What's your thought on -- now I'm blanking on the word. |
**Autumn Nash:** I'm scared, because when he makes that face, it's going to be something ridiculous... |
**Justin Garrison:** No, stored procedures. |
**Pete Naylor:** Stored procedures. Those are kind of interesting. One of the things that I saw with the Amazon teams was they had for the longest time totally avoided them. And it was to their benefit in the end, because they could migrate easily, and everything was great. On the flipside though, there's sometimes a l... |
**Justin Garrison:** Well, that was such a non non-controversial take on storage procedures. |
**Pete Naylor:** It was kind of a non-answer, right? |
**Justin Garrison:** Way to sidestep that one, like a good SA. |
**Pete Naylor:** Yeah, I'll just tiptoe right around the edge of that one, because... You know, I was a bit worried; going back to the fact that we rescheduled this, and there was time for you to really think of the tough questions... |
**Justin Garrison:** Well, do you have any database hot takes? |
**Pete Naylor:** I guess one of them is just like the whole purpose-built database story doesn't add up anymore. The categories that they have and the way that they break things out doesn't actually make sense. |
**Autumn Nash:** I'm surprised you didn't say it was one table. |
**Pete Naylor:** Oh, yeah. |
**Autumn Nash:** Did you see Pete's face? He's like "Oh, God." |
**Pete Naylor:** Yeah. Right. Right. That's another one of the things that I think kind of took on a life of its own, and everybody really wanted to -- |
**Autumn Nash:** It really did. |
**Pete Naylor:** \[unintelligible 00:56:22.16\] view on things... And over time, you just start to realize "Well, let's look at the reality of this. Is it really that different? Maybe you're making some poor decisions." |
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