Our boring start up. Let me explain (analyse).

For a few months now, Dave and I have been working together part-time on a new business. We’d like to share where we’re up to 😄

Photograph by Simson Petrol

Back up — who are you?

Dave and I met at Redgate about 7 years ago, where we worked on productivity software for database development… fun, right?! He mostly worked as a developer, and I mostly worked as a product manager.

We learnt a lot about both the industry in general and how to keep software simple, whilst working in some great teams along the way.

Several jobs (and years) later, we’re both fortunate enough to have some spare time to spend on our own ideas.

So what are you doing?

We both love building software products, but a venture capital backed billionaire-or-bust journey didn’t feel right for us. We thought something niche, for business use, and as-boring-as-possible might just give us a chance.

One unglamorous area we are both familiar with is database software. Over the past few years, Postgres has become more widely adopted, but considering how good it is, and the community, it seemed quite underserved with tooling. We thought we might be well placed to help.

Although our initial ideas didn’t turn out to be successful, a lot of the people we spoke to mentioned a particular problem. We have started building something to help, and are calling it pgMustard.

I actually know a bit about Postgres, tell me more

We want to help save people time. Specifically, those who spend time speeding up queries.

pgMustard will be a performance tuner. You’ll supply an execution plan, and it will visualise the query, giving you schema and query tuning suggestions.

We’re inspired by tools like PEV and explain.depesz.com, but believe that the next step of giving performance tuning advice would be a valuable one.

We think there’s lots to do, but plan to start with:

1. Highlighting which parts are expensive
2. Drawing attention to missing or unused indexes and helping refine them so that the query planner will use them to speed up the query
3. Highlighting bad row count estimates and suggesting how to improve them
4. Flagging sorts or index reads which are taking place on disk and offering recommendations to fit them into memory

If that sounds interesting, and you want in, we’re currently looking for up to 6 people for an alpha program. We’re big believers in listening to customers, so this is an opportunity to guide the direction we take and help us make an awesome product for you.

The program will be monthly half-hour feedback sessions, for 6 months or less. We want to be generous to anybody helping us out, and at minimum will provide both personal and professional licenses for what we build.

We’re looking forward to working with you, thanks in advance!

Update: you can now sign up and get in touch via our website 🐘💛

Update: we’ve now gone full-time 🙌