More than a refresh: Conversations with the most interesting people you've never met

What begins as a conversation about AI, open source, and developer ecosystems quickly grows into something much broader. Pauline and JD explore hacktivism, Anonymous, Scientology, institutional trust, healthcare, politics, and the challenges of navigating an increasingly polarized world. Throughout the episode, Pauline brings a thoughtful perspective to complex topics, arguing that many of today&#...

In this Postgres Love Letters episode, JD is joined by Greg Dostatni, Engineer at Command Prompt, to explore one of PostgreSQL's greatest strengths: the freedom that comes from being open source. What begins as a conversation about licensing quickly expands into portability, transparency, community innovation, and why PostgreSQL continues to give organizations choices that many proprietary dat...

In this episode, JD talks with Sugu Sougoumarane, Head of Multigres at Supabase and co-creator of Vitess, about one of the biggest engineering challenges facing large PostgreSQL deployments: how do you scale beyond a single database without replacing PostgreSQL? Drawing on his experience building Vitess and now leading Multigres, Sugu explains why PostgreSQL is reaching a new stage of growth and w...

PostgreSQL is one of the most trusted databases in the world. So why do backups, recovery, and day-to-day operations still feel harder than they should? In this Postgres Pet Peeves episode, Command Prompt Founder JD and Command Prompt CIO Ildefonso Camargo explore the gap between PostgreSQL's maturity as a database engine and the operational experience surrounding it. From the renaming of pg_x...

In this episode, JD talks with Phenom strategist Cliff Jurkiewicz about hiring, artificial intelligence, and why most conversations around AI miss the practical reality of how people actually work. Cliff argues that AI should be used to reduce repetitive tasks and speed up execution, not replace human judgment, creativity, or communication. The conversation explores hiring trends, layoffs, AI-assi...

In this episode, JD talks with Andrew Aitken, Founder of the Center for Rural AI, about what AI adoption looks like outside major cities and tech hubs. Andrew shares how the organization is working with rural communities, higher education, municipalities, and small businesses to help people better understand and use AI tools in practical ways. The conversation includes examples ranging from local...

In this Postgres Pet Peeves episode, JD talks with Jonah Harris about one of PostgreSQL’s oldest and most debated architectural choices: MVCC and the storage behavior that still shapes how PostgreSQL handles updates, concurrency, and vacuum today. Jonah explains how PostgreSQL originally supported time-travel queries, allowing users to inspect historical versions of data directly, and why PostgreS...

Welcome back to More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions. In this episode, JD talks with MotherDuck Co-Founder and CEO Jordan Tigani about how AI agents are starting to change the way teams explore and interact with data. The conversation begins with a practical question: can AI actually help business users work directly with analytics without needing to know SQL? Jordan explains why newer agent...

In this Postgres Pet Peeves episode, JD talks with Ryan Booz from PG Analyze about a problem many PostgreSQL teams run into far too late: the visibility you need often is not enabled when things start going wrong. The conversation starts with logging and query optimization, but quickly expands into a bigger discussion around PostgreSQL’s configurability and why so many critical settings still feel...

In this episode, Bradon Rogers, Chief Customer Officer at Island, joins JD to break down how enterprise environments became so complex. Over the years, organizations have taken a consumer web browser and layered on proxies, VPNs, data loss prevention tools, and other controls to manage access and security. The result is a fragmented stack that works for the organization, but often creates a poor e...

In this Postgres Pet Peeves episode, Justin Graf and JD take on a long-standing issue in PostgreSQL: transaction IDs (XIDs) and what happens when they wrap around. Despite years of improvements, the system still relies on a 32-bit design that forces ongoing maintenance in high-volume databases. This short session offers a practical look at why XIDs still matter and how they continue to shape perfo...

In this episode, Joris Kuipers, CTO and hands-on architect, joins JD to talk about what it really means to grow as an engineer. As AI begins to take on more of the straightforward coding work, the conversation shifts to the skills that actually define long-term value. Joris explains why writing code is only one part of the job. Understanding customer problems, communicating effectively, and taking...

JD and Thomas Carnevale, Founder of Umbrella Security, get into how modern security infrastructure connects to questions around control, authority, and ownership. What begins with cameras, access control, and surveillance quickly turns into a discussion about who actually decides what we can access, what gets stored, and how those systems evolve over time. They also get into the tension between pr...

In this Postgres Pet Peeves episode, Greg Dostatni and JD take on a problem most teams run into early but rarely question: default configuration. PostgreSQL ships with hundreds of parameters, many of which are still based on assumptions from decades-old hardware. For new users, that doesn’t feel like flexibility, it feels like noise. Greg breaks down why this creates unnecessary complexity and why...

Adding a column with a default value feels like a safe change. It is fast, avoids locking, and keeps things moving. But in Postgres, that speed comes from a tradeoff that can quietly affect performance later. Brian Fehrle, Database Administrator at Command Prompt, explains how Postgres handles these defaults without writing them to disk, and why that can leave the query planner working with incomp...

In this episode, Denis Magda, author of Just Use Postgres, joins JD to talk about how PostgreSQL is often misunderstood. Many developers still approach Postgres as a traditional relational database, even though it has evolved far beyond that. Denis shares how he personally rediscovered Postgres while exploring its modern capabilities, from native JSON support and full-text search to extensions for...

Welcome back to More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions. In this episode, Pauline Vos, software engineer and open source maintainer for MongoDB’s PHP ecosystem, breaks down a reality most teams overlook: the open source libraries your product depends on may be maintained by a single person with no long-term guarantees. What happens when that person steps away? Pauline explains why companies nee...

Welcome to Episode 55 of More Than a Refresh, where JD sits down with Kellyn Pot’Vin-Gorman, Developer Advocate at Redgate, for a candid conversation about AI, governance, and the economics shaping today’s technology landscape. From database culture and open source philosophy to AI monetization models and corporate risk, this episode explores a central tension: if data is the product, who actually...

In this episode of More Than a Refresh: T3D Sessions, Marijn Markus, AI Lead and Managing Data Scientist at Capgemini, breaks down a question most teams aren’t asking clearly enough: what happens when the majority of what we see online isn’t coming from real people? The conversation moves beyond AI hype into something more immediate. Marijn explains the difference between misinformation and disinf...

In this episode, JD talks with Thomas Carnevale, founder of Umbrella Security, about a gap most people don’t realize exists until it’s too late: the difference between systems that look secure and systems that actually deter. Cameras are everywhere, and that’s exactly the problem. As Thomas explains, visibility alone doesn’t stop anything anymore. Real security requires response, timing, and syste...

In this episode, JD sits down with Andrew Bolton, Co-Founder and CEO of Tech Rescue, to explore what happens when a hyper-connected world leaves millions behind. What starts as a conversation about 24-hour technical support quickly expands into something bigger: access to healthcare, logistics, and the growing gap between technology’s capabilities and real human support. Andrew explains how 80 mil...

In this episode, JD sits down with Hunter O’Brien to break down one of the most misunderstood areas of AWS: Identity and Access Management (IAM). Designing policies sounds straightforward, until wildcards, over-permissioned roles, and unclear resource access create real risk in production. Hunter explains how the AWS IAM Policy Simulator allows teams to safely test roles before they reach producti...

Welcome to episode 55 of More Than a Refresh. In this episode, JD Drake talks with Samantha Baldwin, Policy & Research Staff Technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), about the growing push for age verification laws in the United States. These proposals are often framed as protecting children online. But what do they actually require from operating systems, platforms, and users...

In this Postgres Pet Peeves episode, JD sits down with Yurii Rashkovskii to unpack a frustration many experienced engineers quietly share: why is Postgres so difficult to evolve? The conversation centers on architecture. From tightly coupled storage and transaction layers to row-oriented execution models, Yurii explains why experimenting with new storage engines or fundamentally different designs...

In this episode, JD sits down with Command Prompt CIO Ildefonso Camargo to challenge a common assumption in modern infrastructure: if you can afford the cloud, why wouldn’t you use it? What starts as a simple cost comparison turns into a deeper discussion about accounting realities, hardware depreciation, staffing requirements, compliance, and operational risk. Ildefonso shares what sparked the co...