December 04, 2025

Earlier this year we started a program (“Developer U”) to help colleagues who show promise for PostgreSQL Development to become contributors. Because I’m a softie for people’s origin stories, I talked to several of the participants about their motivations, hopes, dreams, and patches.

Bryan Green works on the Platform Operations team at EDB. This is the team that automates the delivery pipeline for EDB’s products, from our developers to our customers across multiple distribution channels.

Bryan in Orlando, visiting the Leaky Cauldron while attending Embedded Linux training in 2023

A bit of background

Bryan started programming at age 12 when his stepfather brought home an Atari 400 for a class he was taking, and he instantly claimed it for himself. "I quickly acquired the Atari Assembler cartridge and never looked back." That early experience with assembly language set the trajectory for his career - he’s always been drawn to understanding how things work at the lowest levels.

At university, Bryan studied computer science and learned C programming. His first job out of school was as an IBM Mainframe Assembly programmer, where he was tasked with writing middleware between Windows NT 3.5 and CICS for a major customer. From there, he moved into implementing specialized file system kernel drivers for Windows, with occasional kernel extensions for Mac as well. Bryan eventually branched out into other programming areas to enable remote work, but has always loved working at the system level.

While his work has almost exclusively been on proprietary products, the Developer U program offers him the chance to contribute to a systems-level open-source project alongside his operations responsibilities. "It’s an opportunity to get back to the low-level systems programming - complex internals, memory management, filesystems, and platform-specific implementations - and do it in the open, contributing to something that millions depend on!"

The complexity and elegance of PostgreSQL’s architecture excites Bryan. "I’m energized by Windows-specific work since it’s an area that needs dedicated attention, and my kernel-level experience from my file system driver days directly applies. Working on a system this sophisticated at such a low level, but in an open-source context, is precisely what I’ve been wanting to do."

Contributing to PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL represents Bryan’s first significant open-source contribution. After decades of proprietary systems work, he views this as his opportunity to finally give back to the community and work in the open. Coming from that world, the level of openness and thoroughness in the review process was striking.

"Every patch gets deep scrutiny from multiple perspectives, and the commitment to stability, backward compatibility, and cross-platform support means changes require extensive testing and discussion. The Windows-specific work revealed how many subtle platform differences can affect database behavior - issues you might never encounter in proprietary, single-platform development. I also didn’t fully appreciate how much institutional knowledge and context go into every decision. The community’s patience in explaining the why behind design choices has been invaluable."

Bryan is active on the pgsql-hackers mailing list, submitting patches and participating in technical discussions. "I have had a few simple patches committed, a couple politely rejected, and a few currently submitted and under review." Highlighting some of Bryan’s committed work, he contributed a fix for a fragile walreceiver test, fixed incorrect fprintf usage in log_error frontend path, and found a solution for POSIX compliance in pgwin32_unsetenv.

For the patches Bryan has in flight, just search the hackers mailinglist.

What’s next?

Having worked on file systems and kernel drivers, Bryan is particularly interested in performance optimizations and low-level architectural improvements. He’s also looking forward to learning from the community’s collaborative process and understanding how design decisions are made for a project of this scale and maturity. "Most of all, I’m excited that Developer U allows me to get back to the systems programming I love."

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