Top all-time · #2512
Philip O'Toole
Personal blog · philipotoole.com · on HN as otoolepprogrammingsystemscareer
Philip O'Toole's personal blog at philipotoole.com covers programming, systems and career. Since 2014, 30 different Hacker News readers have linked it 162 times, most often “Be a conviction engineer”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-24, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link his writing on rqlite, distributed SQLite, read consistency and how rqlite is tested. One commenter lists him among favourite database blogs, and others cite his posts as sources.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Software engineering, distributed systems, databases, and the teams that build them
Most-linked posts?
- Be a conviction engineer4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2016-06-25
- Building a highly-available search engine using SQLite3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-04-25
- Replicating SQLite using Raft Consensus3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-02-23
- My development team costs $41.73 a month3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-08-20
- 9 Years of Open-Source Database Development2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-03-09
- Lessons for new software development managers2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-01-09
- How rqlite is tested2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-01-10
- Coding like it's 1999 (2015)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-10-05
- Faster Reads, Same Guarantees: Linearizable Consistency in rqlite 8.322 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-10-29
- Rqlite 8.17.0 and 8.18.0: Scheduled Vacuums and Enhanced JSON Support2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-01-26
What Hacker News says?
I love reading about articles on Databases, especially about their internal workings. Some of the blogs I follow: 1. Oren Eini - Creator and CTO of Raven DB - https://ayende.com/blog 2. Tyler Neely - Creator of Sled DB - https://medium.com/@tylerneely 3. Philip O'Toole - Creator of rqlite - https://www.philipotoole.com/ 4. Martin Kleppmann - Author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications - https://martin.kleppmann.…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Twelve years of distributed SQLite as a story · 393 points
HN discussionrqlite creator here. There was a Jepsen- style analysis done with rqlite[1] 2 years ago: https://www.philipotoole.com/testing-rqlite-read-consistency... The report itself: https://github.com/wildarch/jepsen.rqlite/blob/main/doc/blog... [1] https://www.rqlite.io
Comment linking /testing-rqlite-read-consistency/
on “Jepsen: Datomic Pro 1.0.7075”Submitted How rqlite is tested as a story · 251 points
HN discussionLooking further into this: The Linearizable mode is newer than the test, so we don’t know if it would have passed. https://philipotoole.com/faster-reads-same-guarantees-linear...
Comment linking /faster-reads-same-guarantees-linearizable-consistency-in-rqlite-8-32/
on “Twelve years of distributed SQLite”Submitted Building rqlite 9.0: Cutting disk usage by half as a story · 197 points
HN discussionhttps://philipotoole.com/testing-rqlite-read-consistency/
Comment linking /testing-rqlite-read-consistency/
on “Twelve years of distributed SQLite”Submitted Rqlite 6.0: the evolution of a distributed database design as a story · 180 points
HN discussionOh, and more background here: https://www.philipotoole.com/building-a-distributed-key-valu...
Comment linking /building-a-distributed-key-value-store-using-raft/
on “A distributed systems reading list”Submitted 400 days of Go as a story · 131 points
HN discussionrqlite creator here. One notable production user is Replicated: https://www.philipotoole.com/replicated-postgres-to-rqlite/
Comment linking /replicated-postgres-to-rqlite/
on “Building rqlite 9.0: Cutting disk usage by half”Submitted The strange economics of open-source software as a story · 105 points
HN discussionI wrote about this too[1], and since rqlite[2] puts a HTTP API in front of SQLite, you've got a SQLite-backed search engine available over the network. [1] https://www.philipotoole.com/building-a-highly-available-sea... [2] https://rqlite.io Disclaimer: I'm the creator of rqlite, and it's not the only piece of software to make SQLite available over the network.
Comment linking /building-a-highly-available-search-engine-using-sqlite/
on “Postgres as a Search Engine”Submitted Replicating SQLite using Raft Consensus as a story · 97 points
HN discussionOr, I should say, I don't add the feature until I can figure out how it can made be easy and intuitive to use. That's assuming the feature is even coherent with the existing feature set of the database. Of course, it's easy for me to do this. I am not developing the database for commercial reasons, so can just say "no" to an idea if I want. That said, I've found that many ideas which didn't seem interesting to me wh…
Comment linking /adding-automatic-s3-backups-to-rqlite/
on “Making database systems usable”Submitted Some of my favourite programming books as a story · 65 points
HN discussionActually rqlite release 7.7.0[1] adds support for RANDOM(). Timestamp functions support will be added to an upcoming release. It does this by statement-rewriting[2] before sending the SQL to the Raft log. [1] https://www.philipotoole.com/rqlite-7-7-0-released/ [2] https://github.com/rqlite/rqlite/blob/master/DOC/NON_DETERMI...
Comment linking /rqlite-7-7-0-released/
on “Litestream live replication has been moved to the LiteFS project”Submitted Consistency over Availability: How rqlite Handles the CAP theorem as a story · 54 points
HN discussionCan rqlite [1] be helpful here? [1] http://www.philipotoole.com/replicating-sqlite-using-raft-co...
Comment linking /replicating-sqlite-using-raft-consensus/
on “RediSQL – A Redis module that provides a functional SQL database”Submitted My development team costs $41.73 a month as a story · 45 points
HN discussionBuilding a robust, performant distributed database on top of a standalone database is not at all trivial. Sure, you could boil it down to "consensus algorithm + DB" but there are countless edge cases. I am not very familiar with this project, but it seems pretty well-tested: https://philipotoole.com/how-is-rqlite-tested/ And you can look at the code here: https://github.com/rqlite/rqlite Does seem a wee bit more com…
Comment linking /how-is-rqlite-tested/
on “My development team costs $41.73 a month”Submitted The strange economics of open-source software (2015) as a story · 34 points
HN discussionI'm the creator of rqlite[1], an open-source distributed database written in Go. It's saving me time (sometimes 2x speed up on certain, well-specified, tasks), and I enjoy using it. I wrote a blog post with some details on how it has helped me code the database: https://www.philipotoole.com/what-did-gpt-4-find-wrong-with-... That said, the most recent release of GPT-4 seems a little more buggy[2]. [1] https://www.rq…
Comment linking /what-did-gpt-4-find-wrong-with-the-rqlite-source-code/
on “Ask HN: Those with success using GPT-4 for programming – what are you doing?”Submitted 7 Years of Open-Source Database Development: Lessons Learned as a story · 33 points
HN discussionI've written about the same comparison, but came to a somewhat different conclusion. In my experience Embedded Software development was poor preparation for my later distributed-systems work (I wrote Embedded Software for 10 years, then distributed databases and logging analysis systems for the next 10). Embedded software is so deterministic compared to large-scale systems. https://www.philipotoole.com/a-prayer-for-…
Comment linking /a-prayer-for-distributed-systems-developers/
on “Embedded programming is like web development”Submitted Code reviews still rule (2015) as a story · 33 points
HN discussion-- I started rqlite[1] in 2014[2], FWIW. While I didn't build the storage engine, or the consensus system, I've built the entire "management" part of the RDBMS from scratch. I'm almost 10 years at it, and there is still plenty to do. [1] https://www.rqlite.io [2] https://www.philipotoole.com/9-years-of-open-source-database...
Comment linking /9-years-of-open-source-database-development-the-design-docs/
on “Building a New Database Management System in Academia”Submitted Why are we still tailing log files? as a story · 24 points
HN discussionIt started off as an experiment almost 10 years ago[1], to see if it was possible -- and it turned out it was. AFAIK rqlite was the first time SQLite was combined with Raft, though many similar systems followed, created by other developers e.g. dqlite. Over time rqlite has became a much more substantial database than it originally was, with a focus on ease-of-deployment and ease-of-operation. I have written a fair a…
Comment linking /replicating-sqlite-using-raft-consensus/
on “Rqlite 8.0”Submitted Building a search system for log data – part 2 as a story · 24 points
HN discussion
