The startup's Postgres survival guide hatchet.run ↗

Alexander Belanger of Hatchet distils Postgres operations into tiers: schema design, indexing and short transactions first; then understanding the query planner (EXPLAIN ANALYZE, accepting that seq scans sometimes make sense) and tuning autovacuum before bloat accumulates; then the sharp tools like FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED queues, partitioning, and trigger-based migrations. The framing that sticks: “queries either seq scan or they don’t”, so optimisation is more binary than it feels.

The HN discussion mostly adds what the guide leaves out: monitoring and alerting for the few fatal failure modes, and a backup and restore plan, which several commenters reckoned is the real first item on any survival guide.