I have the honor of working with a Postgres ~committer~ contributor who was just over 25 when they first contributed! The story about their first commit is great:
They were testing SQL behavior for Materialize and thought to check that both systems handle interval functions identically. Being thorough, they tried something like:
select interval '0.5 months 2147483647 days';
You can try it yourself on dbfiddle[0] Instead of erroring, Postgres returned a bogus value `{"days":-2147483634}` you can read why here[1]
So naturally they decided to fix it in Postgres, which is why they contributed and why it's handled properly in 15+ [2]
> I have the honor of working with a Postgres committer ...
That's not a committer, that's someone who submitted a patch that got committed. A committer is the one who actually applies the patch and can push the branch into the mainline repo. Committers decide if something is worthy of being merged.
Now that aside, yes this plus reviewing patches to get a wider feel for the codebase is how you eventually become a committer.
Best way to eat an elephant is one bite at at time.
This is a common source of confusion for a ton of folks. Anyone can submit a patch, but commit bits are reserved for a much smaller list. The attitude is something like you commit it, you maintain it–so if bugs come in you'll spend your time fixing those for whatever time it takes vs. working on the next shiny feature that you're excited about for the next release.
There was sort of a fuzzy "major" contributors (https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/) which were people that contributed major features and then a list of other contributors. Depending on who you talk to this is either dated or a pretty close attempt at reflection of reality but not perfect. In recent years they expanded the contributors to include others that were contributing in non-code ways though it's still a decent place to find people contributing to major feature sets.
Of course this is not to be confused with the core team–which is more like a steering committee. But not so much steering committee of code and feature sets.
They were testing SQL behavior for Materialize and thought to check that both systems handle interval functions identically. Being thorough, they tried something like:
You can try it yourself on dbfiddle[0] Instead of erroring, Postgres returned a bogus value `{"days":-2147483634}` you can read why here[1]So naturally they decided to fix it in Postgres, which is why they contributed and why it's handled properly in 15+ [2]
[0] https://www.db-fiddle.com/f/ijT76fsmL99bHvXxhAtf7j/0 [1] https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit... [2] https://www.db-fiddle.com/f/i3KikCb72AN1EZpywErZvr/1