Tweet by glcst

July 16, 2026

Almost every single time I released something in my career, I see people saying: you are clueless. You don't understand the space. You don't know what I am doing. In the early days of the Turso Cloud, there was this guy here that would every now and they remark that "Turso keeps building the wrong thing", always followed by an explanation of what SQLite *IS*, what is good at, what is not good at, how people use it, etc. Turso now has almost one signup every 5 minutes, and 700,000 databases were created in our cloud this week. On the rewrite of SQLite itself, the common accusation was that we didn't understand that people use SQLite because of its reliability, and any rewrite would fail because it had no access to their test suite. We took Turso out of beta last week and power many production users already. Before that, it was Scylla, a rewrite of Cassandra. We were roasted by many, who said that we were morons who didn't understand that Cassandra was I/O bound, so any improvements in the CPU architecture were pointless. Scylla was 10x faster than Cassandra in real life. My first experience of that was when at Red Hat we patched QEMU to be the virtualization layer for the device abstraction for the KVM Hypervisor. I was 19 at the time, and being part of the team I submitted a talk to a local conference, who rejected me saying that QEMU was an emulator, and I didn't even seen to understand the different between virtualization and emulation if I was conflating the two. The common thread in all of those is always the same: people getting dead set in their ways, always looking at the world as it is, completely unable to understand that if you just tweak things, most things can be very adaptable. Things can reach new heights. They can be used in different ways.

Author
glcst
Date
July 16, 2026
Open on X