The Faces of Turso: Meet Meteorgan

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.

Today, I sat down for a chat with Meteorgan, a Software Engineer that is using his experience on Turso to keep himself sharp and motivated.

Tell us more about yourself

I'm a software engineer from China. In my previous job, I led two small teams focused on configuration and code management at one of the big internet companies here. After a while, I started feeling a bit burned out and realized the role and the environment weren't best for me. These days, I'm exploring the open source world, looking for interesting and challenging projects to work on. Lately, that's included OpenDAL and Turso.

How did you learn about Turso?

I usually spend about half an hour on Twitter every day just to see what's going on in the wider world. Last year, I came across a post about rewriting SQLite in Rust and thought, that's pretty cool, maybe I could jump in and learn more about databases and Rust along the way. So after wrapping up some tasks I had planned in OpenDAL, I decided to give it a try.

What motivated you to start contributing to Turso?

These days, getting the chance to build a database from scratch that could actually be used in production is pretty rare. And I have always heard people say that SQLite is an exceptionally well-crafted piece of software and a great codebase to explore. I figured I could learn a lot from this project. like understanding more about database internals; studying SQLite's source code; experiencing what it's like to watch a database grow from day one.

How is it working so far? Are you learning as much as you intended?

It's been going pretty well so far. I've learned a lot about the core components of a database and how they work together. With SQLite, I've gotten a solid understanding of how its vdbe(Virtual Database Engine) works, that's also where I've been putting most of my effort in Turso up to now. Of course, there's still plenty more to explore, my plan is to dig into and contribute across all parts of Turso, not just the VM, but also memory management, transaction, storage, the optimizer, and beyond.

What are the things you had fun the most doing in Turso?
It has to be participating in the development of Turso itself. I'd never worked on database internals or collaborated with an international team before, so it's been a completely new and really funny experience for me.

Do you have any advice for people trying to get into Open Source?
There are already plenty of articles on this topic, but for me the most important thing is simple: be fearless and just do it. Don't be afraid to ask 'stupid' questions, submit a rough PR, or even face rejection. That said, there's one important premise: always do your best before ask questions or submitting PRs. It's a way of showing respect both to yourself and to the community. Getting involved in open source is not harder than working in a company. and nowadays, with the help of LLMs, it's even easier.

How did your contributions to Turso help advance your career ?
I'm not aiming for anything specific with this, but I do believe it'll be helpful for my career. At the very least, learning more about database internals helps me understand how to use databases more efficiently. Plus, it's a great way to broaden my skills. Who knows, maybe I'll even step into the database field in the future. And of course, contributing to open source always comes with some nice side benefits, like making connections and opening up more work opportunities.

#Come build the next evolution of SQLite with us!

Want to interact with fantastic developers from all over the world, like Meteorgan? Turso is building a strong Open Contribution community that already has more than 145 developers - and growing.

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