Postgres Summit US2026

Every developer using PostgreSQL relies on a driver. Almost none of them have read one. That gap is where this talk lives.

Maintaining a driver teaches you things application code cannot: what your database actually exposes (SQL is only one slice of the protocol), what your language quietly optimizes for, and what it means to ship a change whose blast radius is measured in companies.

Drawing on years of maintaining pgjdbc and contributing to node-postgres, this talk covers what that job is really like. We'll look at what you learn about PostgreSQL itself: the wire protocol, authentication handshakes, and features that hide behind SQL. We'll also dig into what the contrast between Java and Node reveals about each ecosystem.

We'll talk about unreproducible bug reports, compatibility matrices that grow without bound, security disclosures, and the strange new shape of open-source maintenance in 2026, where AI is simultaneously the most useful tool we have and the reason the PR queue keeps filling up with confident-looking code nobody can quite explain.