Postgres Women India – May‘26 Newsletter

Welcome to Postgres Women India monthly newsletter, May 2026.

We are excited to highlight several key initiatives and events aimed at empowering women in #Data, #AI, and #Postgres ecosystem.

PostgreSQL Turns 30 🎉

Postgres Women India proudly joins the global PostgreSQL community in celebrating 30 years of innovation, collaboration, and open-source excellence.

As part of the celebrations at PGConf.dev, a special women-led breakfast brought together community members to recognize the contributions, leadership, and growing impact of women in the PostgreSQL ecosystem. The gathering reflected the spirit of mentorship, collaboration, and community that has helped PostgreSQL thrive for three decades.

We were honored to be represented by our Chair and Chief Mentor, Hari Kiran, and extend our gratitude for his continued support of the Postgres Women India community.

As PostgreSQL marks this significant milestone, we celebrate the contributors, volunteers, mentors, advocates, and users worldwide who have helped build one of the most trusted and successful open-source database communities.

Happy 30th Birthday, PostgreSQL! Here’s to many more years of innovation, learning, diversity, and community growth.🐘

PGConf.dev 2026: A Memorable Week in Vancouver

Hari Kiran attended PGConf.dev 2026 in Vancouver on behalf of OpenSource DB and represented Postgres Women India during the Postgres Women Breakfast, joining PostgreSQL community members from across the globe for one of the premier PostgreSQL community events.

The conference was filled with insightful discussions, community collaboration, networking opportunities, and knowledge sharing around the PostgreSQL ecosystem.

Hari had the opportunity to participate in two meaningful panel discussions on Day 1:

Beyond the Source: The Human Architecture of PostgreSQL” alongside Floor Drees, Jimmy Angelakos, Miaolai Z., and Valeria Kaplan, discussing contributor journeys, sustaining communities, and preventing burnout in open source.

Onboarding New Community Members to PostgreSQL” with Cornelia Biacsics and Robert Haas, highlighting the importance of creating welcoming experiences for newcomers in the PostgreSQL ecosystem.

Another exciting moment from the conference was Hari delivering a lightning talk at PGConf.dev, contributing to the vibrant exchange of ideas and technical discussions within the community.

One of the memorable highlights of the event was meeting and interacting with renowned PostgreSQL contributors and community leaders, including Tom Lane, along with members of the PostgreSQL Code of Conduct Committee such as Floor Drees and Gary Evans.

Representing Postgres Women India at the Postgres Women Breakfast was another proud moment, reinforcing the importance of diversity, inclusion, and community participation across the open-source ecosystem.

PGConf.dev 2026 once again showcased that PostgreSQL is not just a database technology, but a global community built on collaboration, learning, mentorship, and shared passion for open source.

With PGConf.dev 2027 already announced for Montreal, the PostgreSQL community eagerly looks forward to another incredible gathering next year.

Postgres Women India Upskill Program 2026 Highlights

🏅 Recognizing Excellence

Postgres Woman of the Month – May 2026 | Shveta Malik

Postgres Women India is proud to recognize Shveta Malik, Principal Software Developer at Fujitsu, as our Postgres Woman of the Month for May 2026.

Shveta is an active contributor to PostgreSQL, focusing on Logical Replication and working closely with the open-source community on feature design, review, and validation of upstream contributions. Her work on replication slot synchronization and enhancing logical replication failover robustness has strengthened the PostgreSQL ecosystem.

A significant milestone in her open-source journey came in 2025 when she was recognized as a Significant Contributor to PostgreSQL, highlighting her growing impact within the global community.

Before her PostgreSQL contributions, Shveta spent over a decade working on the Oracle Database Optimizer, gaining extensive expertise in query optimization, execution planning, and database performance tuning.

We celebrate Shveta’s technical excellence, dedication, and continued efforts in advancing PostgreSQL. Her journey serves as an inspiration to aspiring contributors and women in open source.

Read more about Shveta and her PostgreSQL journey https://lnkd.in/dH5aPEvS.

Rookie of the Month - May 2026 | Sayli Khedekar

We’re excited to feature Sayli Khedekar as our RookieOfTheMonth for May 2026.

Sayli Khedekar is a passionate Database Administrator with nearly a decade of experience in Oracle and growing expertise in PostgreSQL on AWS RDS. Driven by real-world production challenges, she has been actively transitioning into a PostgreSQL-focused Database SRE role with a strong focus on reliability, observability, automation, and cloud-native practices.

Her curiosity and hands-on learning approach led her to build open-source tools like pg-snap-anon and pg_query_guardian, inspired by practical production incidents and designed to improve database safety and operational reliability. Sayli is also deeply interested in AI-assisted DBA tooling, pgvector, and modern PostgreSQL engineering practices.
A firm believer in continuous learning and community collaboration, she credits Postgres Women India for strengthening her PostgreSQL journey and continues to contribute, learn, and grow within the open-source ecosystem.

Check out this link to know more about her: https://lnkd.in/gUGUZMQX

EnableHER – Honoring the Backbone Builders

At Postgres Women India, we believe strong tech communities are built not only by engineers and database experts, but also by the incredible women who enable ecosystems to grow every day.
Introducing EnableHER — an initiative to celebrate women driving impact across the Data, AI, and Open-source ecosystem through community building, platform growth, operations, outreach, partnerships, design, events, and engagement.
EnableHER will spotlight inspiring women who create opportunities, foster collaboration, and strengthen communities in meaningful ways.

EnableHER of the Month – Bhavani Indukuri

Postgres Women India is proud to feature Bhavani Indukuri as our EnableHER of the Month.

Bhavani is a Senior Software Engineer II at DigitalOcean, a Cloud Native leader, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2025 Co-Chair, and an active community advocate. With over a decade of experience in distributed systems, platform engineering, and DevOps, she has made significant contributions to both technology and community building.

From a Telugu-medium educational background to becoming a respected voice in the Cloud Native ecosystem, Bhavani’s journey is a testament to perseverance, continuous learning, and leadership.

Her guiding principle comes from her father’s advice:
“Do your best in whatever you choose to do, because that defines who you are.”

Bhavani believes that talent can come from anywhere when given the right opportunities. Through mentorship, public speaking, and community engagement, she continues to inspire women to pursue their goals with confidence.

For Bhavani, EnableHER means empowering women through support, mentorship, and encouragement, helping create stronger communities and opening doors for future generations to dream bigger.

Read her inspiring story and learn more about her journey https://lnkd.in/g7F7vNGu

📘 Learn & Share Series:

Aarti Nadekar – Sharing insightful articles about PostgreSQL community

📅 Upcoming Events:

📌 June 13, 2026 – PGDay Pune 2026 – A community-driven PostgreSQL conference bringing together users, developers, DBAs, architects, and open-source enthusiasts for a day of technical talks, networking, and knowledge sharing. 👉 More details & registration: Postgres Pune

📌 June 17, 2026 – Distributed SQL Summit (DSS) Mumbai 2026 – Join database professionals and technology leaders to explore distributed SQL, cloud-native databases, and modern data architectures. Hari Kiran, Founder of OpenSource DB, will be speaking at the event. 👉 Register here

📌 June 18, 2026 – Posette 2026 Livestream – Hari Kiran’s pre-recorded session for Posette 2026 will be streamed as part of this global online PostgreSQL conference featuring speakers and community members from around the world.

📌 June 20, 2026 – PreSales Collective Meetup – OpenSource DB is proud to sponsor this event, bringing together pre-sales professionals, solution architects, and technology leaders for learning, networking, and community engagement.

📌 June 27, 2026 – PgVizag Meetup #6 – PostgreSQL enthusiasts come together for technical talks, community discussions, and networking opportunities. Call for Papers is now open! CFP Deadline: June 17, 2026. 👉 Submit your talk: CFP – Visakhapatnam PostgreSQL group | Registrations

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