Hey! I'm Phil (he/him). In the past I've been a developer, a manager, and a cofounder. At companies as large as Oracle and as small as TigerBeetle. Today I'm a staff engineer working on Postgres products at EnterpriseDB.
I am a college dropout (not by choice; stay in school!) and for the last 10 years I've chased my way down the software stack starting from humble beginnings with the venerable jQuery and PHP.
I try to practice healthy obsession.
To that end, I run the NYC Systems Coffee Club (400+ members), NYC Systems at Night, co-run the NYC Systems talk series (1k+ members), run an online Software Internals Book Club (1k+ members), and I run a Software Internals Discord (6k+ members) that has, among other things, become a home for database and distributed systems developers.
I play a good deal of volleyball in NYC, keep trying to cook new dishes, and love to read.
My writing has been cited in the book Writing for Developers.
I hope you connect with me on LinkedIn (7k+ followers), Twitter (22k+ followers), Bluesky (4k+ followers), or over email.
Chatting and fundraising
I absolutely love to meet people. If you ever want to catch up, here's a little page to help me out with scheduling.
I go out of my way to chat with folks who donate $100 to educational non-profits (details on that page) and I've raised $1150 since starting this program in November 2024.
I occasionally share a public response to interesting questions I receive (and anonymize).
Recommendations and favorites
- Best of New York Tech Scene
- Tactical marketing
- B-Tree resources
- Consensus resources
- Technical blogs
- Technical books
- Business books
- General book recommendations
- Compiler and interpreter resources
- Getting started with database development
- WeWorks of Manhattan
Videos and streaming
- Streaming on Twitch, Sundays at 5pm ET
- Stream archives on YouTube