John Pruitt, a senior software engineer at Timescale, has been working with computers since he was four years old, introduced to them by his father, a power systems engineer. He initially learned SQL in college and later applied it to time-series applications for the power industry. Pruitt's work ethic earned him multiple degrees, including a master's in Engineering Management while working full-time. He currently works on TimescaleDB, an extension of PostgreSQL, which he believes should be "boring," meaning easy to use and scalable without much effort. Pruitt advises learning SQL by solving puzzles rather than approaching it from an object-oriented programming perspective. He uses the command line `psql` client for PostgreSQL and finds SQL to be a joy compared to other programming languages, allowing him to quickly connect to databases and start querying.