The Faces of Turso: Meet Ihor

Open Source is the most incredible force in the world. It is a learning experience like no other, that provides opportunities for developers all over the world to grow and build the future together. It is believing in this power that we are building Turso, a complete rewrite of SQLite in Rust, featuring concurrent writes, incremental materialized views, native encryption, but most importantly: an Open Contribution community that allows developers to come and have a seat at the table.

Our community is a special community. One of the things I particularly love is how it is becoming a magnet for people with unconventional backgrounds to come and prove their worth as newly minted software engineers. In the past I sat down with contributors who came from Aviation, Music, among other cool stories of the Turso community.

Today, I sat down for a chat with Ihor, a Surgeon turned Software Engineer that is using his experience on Turso to free himself from frontend work.

#Tell us more about yourself

Hey, I'm Ihor from Ukraine. My journey into tech is a bit unconventional: I went through med school and surgical training before realizing I needed a complete career change. I taught myself programming and started out as a frontend developer, making my way through the industrial React grind. But when I found myself getting competitive about laying out boxes in a browser window, I realized I needed more from this life. So I started exploring how real software is built. And now I'm here. I don't know if that's good or bad yet, but at least it's interesting.

#Wow! That’s amazing! Well, I guess you can take care of the health of our Open Source project?

Haha, well, I can't prescribe antibiotics for buggy code, but I don't think that will help anyway. But I love that you're focused on building reliable systems from the beginning - deterministic simulation testing is like preventive medicine for software. That's the kind of approach I want to learn from.

#How did you learn about Turso?

I watched an interview on YouTube with you, Pekka, and some guy in a hoodie, can't recall his name, but it had something to do with aging, or agean, and prime numbers. Something like that. The interview sparked an internal dialogue for me about what makes someone both a good person and a good software developer. I'm convinced you can't get far running solely on ego and technical skills, there needs to be something more foundational: curiosity, humility, and a genuine interest in solving real problems rather than just showcasing what you know. The best developers I've encountered are those who balance technical excellence with empathy, collaboration, and a willingness to learn from others. That interview made me think about Turso not just as a technology, but as a product built by people who seem to care about those values.

#What motivated you to start contributing to Turso?

I wanted to learn Rust as my second language, sure, but more than that, I wanted to crack open the black box and actually understand how databases work under the hood. I also craved that feeling of being part of something bigger, you know? The open source community has this energy and collaborative force that's just... different. It's real. Contributing to OSS isn't just about the code for me, it's about curiosity, learning, and constantly seeking out the next interesting problem to solve. That's what keeps me going. The main motivation was obviously that Pekka was pretty liberal about hitting the merge button, so I spotted a chance and took it.

#I, very unfortunately, have known Pekka for over 15 years. He’s far from liberal with the merge button. You must have done something right!

Busted! Alright, I admit, I knew I was exaggerating there. But in reality, it means a lot for fresh developers like me to get approval from people who've been in the industry for a long time and achieved so much. So his approval absolutely gave me confidence in my skills. And that's one of the things nobody tells you when people talk about open source, confidence boosts you a lot as a developer.

#What are the things you had fun the most doing in Turso?

The SQLite binary JSON representation was my opus magnum. For some unknown reason, all programmers love writing parsers, I'm no different. It was fascinating getting into the SQLite devs' thought process and evaluating the tradeoffs of their approach. What's also been fun is seeing cool new features like the CDC (change data capture) that Sivukhin built on top of my code. I hope he wasn't swearing too much while using the APIs I introduced.

#Who is your favorite community member in Turso?

Oh thanks for this question, Glauber! I'm a fan of the Suomalainen mafia [editor note: TIL, this is a fancy way of saying Finnish], those guys are just built differently. But they get plenty of spotlight in these blogs, so I'll be original and choose Pedro. The discipline and consistency of that kid are outstanding. He's the first zoomer I know with such great personality traits. He's definitely going to be a star in the near future, if he isn't already.

#Come build the next evolution of SQLite with us!

Want to interact with fantastic developers from all over the world, like Ihor? Turso is building a strong Open Contribution community that already has more than 165 developers - and growing.

Want to join Ihor and others? Star and join us on Github today!