June 2021 Summaries

Contributing to open-source projects like PostgreSQL can be intimidating, but with the right approach, it can also be a rewarding experience. The author of this text, Aleks, shares his hard-earned tips and observations to help new contributors make their first contribution or start contributing more. He emphasizes that identifying your motivation for contributing is crucial, and then familiarizing yourself with the project's development process, including learning about the codebase, testing, documentation, and debugging. Once you've settled on an idea for your first patch, it's essential to prepare to contribute by avoiding common mistakes such as starting with something too complex or not listening carefully to feedback. Aleks also highlights various ways to contribute beyond coding, such as helping newcomers, participating in conferences, creating a blog or podcast, writing a book, and donating hardware for the CI system. The text concludes that contributing to open-source projects is an excellent way to gain experience, learn new skills, and make users happier, while also being a valuable addition to the community.

The Timescale team has shared numerous new resources and product updates as part of their Always Be Launching initiative. These include six Timescale Cloud releases, two TimescaleDB releases, one Promscale release, and the publication of the State of PostgreSQL 2021 survey results. The team has also announced a $40 million Series B funding round, released several new features, including Timescale Cloud Explorer, VPC Peering, and improved columnar compression for time-series data on PostgreSQL. Additionally, they have shared various educational resources, technical content, videos, and tutorials to help developers learn about time-series data and work with TimescaleDB. The team is committed to supporting and growing communities around the world and aims to share educational resources as broadly as possible.