Ben Johnson, creator of Litestream and LiteFS, talks about his involvement in SQLite development and the challenges of open source contributions. They discuss the different use cases for Litestream and LiteFS, as well as the greater server-side SQLite landscape. Ben also shares his thoughts on the unique contribution policy of SQLite and their personal experiences with disallowing contributions on their own projects.

Lucio Franco, contributor to Tonic and the asynchronous Rust ecosystem, discusses the challenges of async Rust, his plan for getting a job in distributed databases, avoiding power dynamics in the Tokio team, problems in working on open-source in the corporate world, and why he encouraged a collaborator to go on without him.

rqlite is a lightweight, distributed relational database built on Raft and SQLite. Founder Philip O’Toole (@general_order24) decided to combine these technologies while working at a startup years ago. The startup no longer exists, but rqlite is going strong. Today, Philip is an engineering manager at Google, while he continues to be the driving force behind the open development of rqlite. Contributor is looking for a community manager! If you want to know more, shoot us an email at eric@scalevp.com. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications! In this episode we discuss: The biggest misconceptions about how rqlite differs from SQLite Why writing databases is more interesting than new programmers might think The tradeoff between a large community versus smaller, more focused leadership Reasons why open-source development progresses in bursts of energy How to really pronounce “rqlite” Links: rqlite InfluxData dqlite Litestream libSQL Turso OpenTelemetry People: Ben Johnson (@benbjohnson) Other episodes: libSQL with Glauber Costa

Kuba Martin, Software Engineering Team Lead at Spacelift and Interim Tech Lead of OpenTofu, the open-source fork of Terraform, discusses how OpenTofu handled licensing and copyright, benefits of a technical steering committee, recreating the community registry, and more.

Ry Walker (@rywalker) is the founder and CEO of Tembo, the Postgres developer platform for building any and every data service. To Ry, the full capabilities of Postgres appear underappreciated and underused for most users. Tembo is an attempt to harness the large ecosystem of Postgres extensions, and ultimately collapse the database sprawl of the modern data stack.  Contributor is looking for a community manager! If you want to know more, shoot us an email at eric@scalevp.com. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications! In this episode we discuss: Taking the “red pill” of using Postgres for everything Providing universal support for Postgres extensions Why Ry dislikes the current state of the modern data stack How databases across the board have mostly changed into application platforms What makes Tembo “Startup Mt. Everest” Links: Tembo OSSRank Citus Data Modal Supabase Wrappers People mentioned: Erik Bernhardsson (@bernhardsson) Other episodes: Clickhouse with Alexey Milovidov and Ivan Blinkov

Jan Oberhauser (@JanOberhauser) is the founder and CEO of n8n, the free and source-available workflow automation tool for technical users. n8n's flexible architecture allows users to avoid the limitations of other automation tools, while also opening doors for complex automation scenarios. The project has garnered over 30,000 GitHub stars and a thriving community of 55,000+ members. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community! In this episode we discuss: How Jan’s background in film effects laid the groundwork for n8n Why n8n uses a forum over Discord or Slack for a community platform Use cases from scheduling fitness classes to upgrading financial mainframes How n8n might stack up against the well-thought out Python script Why n8n uses a fair-code license rather than open-source Links: n8n n8n Community Other episodes: Temporal with Maxim Fateev From Orchestration to Building Applications: Conductor with Jeu George Rethinking the Workflow Problem: Windmill with Ruben Fiszel

Glauber Costa (@glcst) is the founder of Turso and the co-creator of libSQL, an open source, open contribution fork of the database engine library, SQLite. Most people believe that SQLite is open-source software, but it actually exists in the public domain and doesn’t accept external contributions. With their big fork, Glauber and his team have set out to evolve SQLite into a modern database with support for distributed data, an asynchronous interface, compatibility with WASM and Linux, and more. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community! In this episode we discuss: Community reactions to forking SQLite How Glauber was spoiled by starting his career developing for Linux The controversial decision to launch libSQL without writing a single line of code The plan for incorporating upstream changes from SQLite Examples of how application developers need to move code “to the edge” Links: libSQL SQLite Turso LiteFS Litestream rqlite VLCN People mentioned: Avi Kivity (@AviKivity) Dor Laor (@DorLaor) Ben Johnson (@benbjohnson) Phillip O’Toole (@general_order24) Matt Tantaman (@tantaman) Other episodes: Scylla with Dor Laor  Apache Cassandra with Patrick McFadin

Ruben Fiszel (@rubenfiszel) is the creator of Windmill, the open-source developer platform that lets users easily turn scripts into workflows and internal apps with auto-generated UIs. Windmill doesn’t force engineers to change their coding style or adopt a convoluted API, and its low-code design makes it accessible to non-technical users. Tune in to find out how Windmill offers speed, performance and flexibility, while avoiding the limitations of rigid tools. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community! In this episode we discuss: Why many engineers try to reinvent the wheel when it comes to workflow engines When Ruben first saw the need for a platform like Windmill while working at Palantir “Today is the nicest period to build open-source…” Ruben’s incredible presence with support and bug fixes Windmill’s generous open-source offerings and the future of the business Links: Windmill Retool Tokio Apache Airflow Apache Spark Other episodes: Prefect with Jeremiah Lowin Dagster with Nick Schrock Temporal with Maxim Fateev Temporal (Part 2) with Maxim Fateev and Dominik Tornow Apache Cassandra with Patrick McFadin

Jesse Clark, co-founder of Marqo, discusses the rapid growth of their multimodal vector search engine. Topics include the importance of Marqo for organizations, machine learning language, dealing with AI innovation stress, and the journey from physics research to starting Marqo.

Jeu George (@jeugeorge) is the co-creator of Conductor, the open-source application building platform. Conductor began as a workflow orchestrator and was originally developed at Netflix. Jeu also co-founded Orkes, a company which offers a cloud product based on Conductor. Tune in to find out how Conductor has evolved into an open-source, battle-tested distributed application platform. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community! In this episode we discuss: The core tenets of building Conductor - reliability, language and cloud agnosticism How Conductor enables teams to share and manage their custom modules The role of Conductor in Netflix’s switch from licensed to original content Jeu’s journey from Netflix, to Uber, and finally to Orkes How Orkes is focusing on integrations and AI orchestration moving forward Links: Conductor Orkes People mentioned: Viren Baraiya (@virenbaraiya) Boney Sekh (@boneyorkes) Dilip Lukose (@diliplukose)