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Comment by akulkarni | Hacker News Reader

(Timescale co-founder / CEO)

I just want to say that we wouldn't be here without the support, feedback -- and yes, even the honest critiques -- from the HN community. So thank you everyone.

As we like to say, we've come a long way in the past 5 years, but we're just getting started :-)

And we're hiring globally for our remote-first team!

https://www.timescale.com/careers

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As a user of Timescale, one of the things I find most lacking with Timescale (and postgres also to be honest) is good educational content on par with MongoDB University; structured courses that teach you database design concepts from first principles and then what problems postgres/timescale solve on top of them. Hands on experience working with datasets and an interactive way of learning more about the types of things you can do.

I realize Timescale and Mongo are very different things, but when I got professionally started with software 10 years ago, the MongoDB courses (and the stanford online Intro to DB course) were immensely helpful. Working with Timescale professionally now I'm often unsure whether I'm doing things suboptimally, e.g. making tables hypertables when a regular table might be better, flexibility and capabilities of indexes with hypertables, and application-facing tooling.

Totally fair and something that I'm actually forming a team to work on! We're starting with some very foundational material [1], that may well be review and it's not as formal / professional as Mongo University or the like, but I am going to be continuing this course and then we'll be iterating more from there. I'd really love some feedback and also your questions, ie what you want to cover or what you find confusing. You can leave comments on the video or in our community Slack channel[2] or forum[3]. Thanks for the feedback and I hope we'll be able to do some of that for you over the coming months!

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLJm2oStD9w [2]: timescaledb.slack.com [3]: https://www.timescale.com/forum/

We agree that the world needs more PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB educational content, and welcome any help!

TimescaleDB has some of the best documentation available for open source and super helpful developer advocates. They are also happy to reach out to dev teams using TimescaleDB (even open source version). We recently did a guest blog post with them:

https://www.timescale.com/blog/how-trading-strategy-built-a-...

(original commenter suggesting course-style educational content here)

I agree completely with this. The documentation is great and the community on slack has been incredibly helpful when I've posted there. Even still, I personally think a lot of people would benefit from course content like MongoDB provides.

Thank you for the wonderful guest post (and the kind words!)

What is the meaning of ‘from first principles’? Sorry I am not up to date on the terms

Thanks for making Timescale, my company ThoughtMetric is an early adopter and we currently ingest about 1M rows of data per day using it. One highly requested feature that we desperately need is continuous aggregates that can join multiple tables together. Right now we have to use regular materialized views to accomplish that and it sucks.

Thanks for letting me know. Have you filed a Github issue? If so, could you point me to it? Thanks!

https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb

I appreciate the response! Here is the github issue https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/issues/1446

Thank you! I shared it with the team

Congrats and I was wondering if you can comment on the current team size? I'm looking at the number of contributors that have created pull requests within the last four months and it is shockingly low (in a good way). Based on the following:

https://oss.gitsense.com/insights/github?q=pull-age%3A%3C%3D...

It looks like there has only really been 7-10 full time contributors and for you to have raised what you have with such a small team is quite impressive. Is development happening elsewhere or is my hunch correct?

Edit: Thanks to feedback from mfreed, below is a more accurate picture of development activity:

https://oss.gitsense.com/insights/github?p=authors&q=pull-ag...

Hi! So the team is over 100 at this point, but engineering effort is spread across multiple products at this point.

The core timescaledb repo [0] currently has 10-15 primary engineers, with a few others working on DB hyperfunctions and our function pipelining [1] in a separate extension [2]. I think generally the set of outside folks who contribute to low-level database internals in C is just smaller than other type of projects.

We also have our promscale product [3], which is our observability backend powered by SQL & TimescaleDB.

And then there is Timescale Cloud [4], which is obviously a large engineering effort, most of which does not happen in public repos.

Interested? We're growing the teams aggressively! Fully remote & global.

https://www.timescale.com/careers

[0] https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb

[1] https://www.timescale.com/blog/function-pipelines-building-f...

[2] https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb-toolkit

[3] https://github.com/timescale/promscale ; https://github.com/timescale/tobs

[4] https://www.timescale.com/blog/announcing-the-new-timescale-...

Hey thanks for the insights! I've added all timescale repos for indexing and should have the bigger picture in a few hours. Thanks again for catering to my curiosity.

How did you get started?

I've dealt with databases for a very long time, But I frankly find SQL extremely hard and I could never imagine forking postgres to improve it.

Is this your first company, did you personally write much of the early code, or did you hire a team to do so.

As a side note, I'm seeing an insane amount of movement when it comes to business to business VC funding.

What about an entertainment product ?

Hypothetically, if you were given a year off to come up with a new product, do you think it would be possible?

I would absolutely love to read a blog post where you discuss the challenges you've faced getting here.

Timescaler here. Linking a few posts below [0][1] that answer the majority of your very good questions. The posts detail why and how TimescaleDB started and why the founders chose to build a time-series database on PostgreSQL.

[0]: https://www.timescale.com/blog/when-boring-is-awesome-buildi... [1]: https://www.timescale.com/blog/40-million-to-help-developers...

Thank you !

I plan on reading this all in full.

Edit : Very impressive way to pivot , best of luck !

Thank you :-)

There's a lot of lessons I've learned along the way

These are probably two of the top ones:

1. Solve a big problem that people have (even better if you personally have it)

2. Who you work with matters more than what you work on :-)

So the big question I have is how do I get started ?

Looks like you had a small company, that was able to pivot and expand.

I'm planning on spending at least 3 months diving into my side projects, and then I'll try YC again.

Do I then just cold email various YC like funds until I fetch some interest, or should I focus on building my project.

Did you originally call the database, "Scale DB"? If so I think we considered you for something in 2015/2016 or so!

Nope :-) That's another product :-D

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