Working on databases from prison

I'm very excited to announce that I have recently joined Turso as a software engineer. For many in the field, including myself, getting to work on databases and solve unique challenges with such a talented team would be a dream job, but it is that much more special to me because of my unusual and unlikely circumstances. As difficult as it might be to believe, I am currently incarcerated and I landed this job from my cell in state prison. If you don’t know me, let me tell you more about how I got here.

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Nearly two years have passed since I published How I got here to my blog. That post was my first real contact with the outside world in years, as I'd been off all social media and the internet since 2017. The response and support I would receive from the tech community caught me completely off guard.

A brief summary is that I'm currently serving prison time for poor decisions and lifestyle choices I made in my twenties, all related to drugs. Three years ago, I enrolled in a prison college program that came with the unique opportunity to access a computer with limited internet access. This immediately reignited a teenage love for programming and a lightbulb immediately lit up: that this would be my way out of the mess I had gotten myself into over the past 15 years. I quickly outgrew the curriculum, preferring instead to spend ~15+ hours a day on projects and open source contributions.

Through fortunate timing and lots of hard work, I was selected to be one of the first participants in the Maine Dept of Correction’s remote work program, where residents who meet certain requirements are allowed to seek out remote employment opportunities. I landed a software engineering job at a startup called Unlocked Labs building education solutions for incarcerated learners, while contributing to open source on the side. After just a year, I was leading their development team.

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Last December I was between side-projects and browsing Hacker News when I discovered Project Limbo, an effort by Turso to rewrite SQLite from scratch. I'd never worked on relational databases, but some experience with a cache had recently sparked an interest in storage engines. Luckily for me I saw that the project was fairly young with plenty of low hanging fruit to cut my teeth on.

To put this entirely into perspective for some of you may be difficult, but in prison there isn’t exactly a whole lot to do and programming absolutely consumes my life. I either write code or manage Kubernetes clusters or other infrastructure for about 90 hours a week, and my only entertainment is a daily hour of tech/programming YouTube; mostly consisting of The Primeagen, whose story was a huge inspiration to me early on.

Through Prime, I had known about Turso since the beginning and had watched several interviews with Glauber and Pekka discussing their Linux kernel backgrounds and talking about the concept of distributed, multi-tenant SQLite. These were folks I'd looked up to for years and definitely could not have imagined that I would eventually be in any position to be contributing meaningfully to such an ambitious project of theirs. So needless to say, for those first PR's, just the thought of a kernel maintainer reviewing my code had made me quite nervous.

Helping build Limbo quickly became my new obsession. I split my time between my job and diving deep into SQLite source code, academic papers on database internals, and Andy Pavlo's CMU lectures. I was active on the Turso Discord but I don't think I considered whether anyone was aware that one of the top contributors was doing so from a prison cell. My story and information are linked on my GitHub, but it's subtle enough where you could miss it if you didn't read the whole profile. A couple months later, I got a Discord message from Glauber introducing himself and asking if we could meet.

In January, Glauber's tweet about our interaction caught the attention of The Primeagen, and he ended up reading my blog post on his stream, bringing a whole lot of new attention to it.

To this day I receive semi-regular emails either from developers, college kids or others who maybe have either gone through addiction or similar circumstances, or just want to reach out for advice on how to best start contributing to open source or optimize their learning path.

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I'm incredibly proud to be an example to others of how far hard work, determination and discipline will get you, and will be forever grateful for the opportunities given to me by the Maine Dept of Corrections to even be able to work hard in the first place, and to Unlocked Labs for giving me a chance and hiring me at a time when most assuredly no-one else would.

I'm also incredibly proud to announce that I am now working for Turso full time, something I would never have dreamed would be possible just a few years ago, I'm very excited to be a part of the team and to get to help build the modern evolution of SQLite.

Although some recent bad news from the court means that I won't be coming home as early as my family and I had hoped, my only choice is to view this as a blessing and for the next 10 months, will instead just be able to continue to dedicate time and focus to advancing my career at such a level that just wouldn't be possible otherwise.

Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to reach out over the past couple years, to my team at Unlocked Labs, and especially my parents. Thanks to Turso for the opportunity and to all the other companies with fair chance hiring policies who believe that people deserve a second chance. This journey has been totally surreal and every day I am still in awe of how far my life has come from the life I lived even just a few years ago.