If you have spent any time in the Postgres community, you already know the name pgstef. Stefan Fercot has spent years as one of the most visible advocates for pgBackRest, a familiar face at European Postgres conferences, and countless hallway conversations about backups, high availability, and everything in between. Now he is doing that work from inside Percona, and if you are at Percona Live Amsterdam this week, you can meet him in person at the Postgres booth.
Stefan joined Percona as a senior software engineer on the Postgres engineering team, with a clear mandate: keep ramping up contribution to pgBackRest, the backup and restore tool he has championed for years. Percona has been one of the major sponsors of the pgBackRest project since last April, and bringing Stefan on board is part of a broader push to deepen that investment.
For most of pgBackRest’s history, the project’s primary contributor has been David Steele, long employed by Crunchy Data. Stefan was, for years, the only community contributor on the GitHub project outside of Crunchy itself, mostly known for advocacy work: teaching people how to use the tool, answering questions on GitHub and Slack, and pushing adoption forward. When Crunchy Data’s involvement changed and David found himself without an employer to fund his continued work on the project, a consortium of sponsors stepped in, Percona among them, to keep pgBackRest development funded and moving. That is the moment Stefan describes as the turning point.
“They promised something, and they delivered it,” he said. “They care about the project, they care about the product, and they want to build a team around it. And when they commit to something, they do it.”
That follow-through, more than anything else, is what brought Stefan to Percona full time.
Stefan’s career has moved back and forth between hands-on Postgres consultancy and support work, and periods of deeper contribution to pgBackRest itself. He described it as a natural rhythm: pick up support and training work for a few years, then circle back to the project when it needs attention. Right now, pgBackRest has gained fresh visibility, new contributors are ramping up, and Stefan felt it was the right moment to get back to code contribution in a serious way.
He also pointed to something less tangible than funding or headcount: the people. Stefan has met Percona engineers at Postgres events for years, staffing booths, organizing sessions, and having genuine technical conversations in the hallway rather than sales pitches. That is the distinction he draws between a real open source project and a proprietary, single-vendor product. At Percona, he said, the discussion and development are open, and anyone can contribute, give feedback, or use the tools. That mindset, more than any single feature or funding announcement, is what made the difference for him.
Stefan brings more than a decade of experience managing and optimizing Postgres in high-availability environments, and two lessons have stuck with him the whole way.
First: never store your backups on the same machine as your database. If you lose the server, you lose everything with it.
Second, and arguably more important: do not trust your backups. Trust the restore. You never actually know whether a backup is good until you have tried to restore it and confirmed that Postgres can recover from it. Clues are not proof. Only a successful restore is proof.
These are not abstract principles for Stefan. They come from years of being the person who gets the 2am call when a server has crashed and someone needs a restore, followed by the quieter, less glamorous work of stepping back to fix the systemic issues that caused the outage in the first place. As he put it, when you are always putting out fires, you never have time to implement the changes that would prevent the next one. Joining Percona, he said, gives him the room to actually do that work.
Stefan was careful to point out that he is not the lead contributor to pgBackRest. That is still David Steele, who continues to drive the project’s larger architectural and feature work. Stefan’s role has always leaned toward advocacy: representing the tool at conferences, helping users troubleshoot, and doing smaller code contributions alongside that visibility work. What changes with Percona’s backing is the ability to sustain that work at scale. Andrew Pogrebnoi, a long-time Percona engineer, has already been ramping up pgBackRest contributions over the summer, and Stefan’s arrival adds another dedicated set of hands and a well-known voice in the ecosystem.
Beyond pgBackRest, Stefan is one of the organizers behind major Postgres community events, including PGConf.EU and FOSDEM PGDay. He is coordinating the Postgres booth at Percona Live from the Postgres Europe side, which means his first weeks at Percona have been a mix of onboarding and event logistics. Percona supporting his continued involvement in organizing these events matters to him. It is a way for the company to be visible in the community not just by writing checks, but by putting in the work of organizing and promoting the events that hold the ecosystem together.
Stefan sees the Postgres community itself shifting toward being more welcoming to newcomers, driven in part by senior contributors and core committers who want to open the door to new voices. He is candid that the project has not fully closed that gap yet. The people who already know Postgres will keep showing up. The real challenge is reaching the people who do not yet know where to start, whether that means backup tools, high availability solutions, or deployment methods. His advice to anyone in that position: go to conferences, but keep a critical mind and test things yourself rather than taking any one recommendation at face value. And if you cannot find the answers you need at a conference, start smaller. Connect with a local Postgres community organizer and host a meetup. You will find other people wrestling with the exact same questions, and that exchange, offering help and getting help in return, is how real technical communities get built.
Percona Live Amsterdam is happening now, and Stefan will be at the Postgres booth. Whether you want to talk pgBackRest internals, ask about backup and recovery strategy for your own environment, or just compare notes on where Postgres is heading next, this is the moment to do it in person. As Stefan put it, this is a place where you can get stuff done: not just get a problem fixed, but actually influence the direction of the tools you rely on every day.
If you are at the show, stop by and say hello to pgstef. If you are not, keep an eye on Percona’s channels. This is only the beginning of what he is bringing to the Postgres team.
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