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How I Was Convinced to Take Rust Seriously

In the previous article I described a path from dynamic languages toward TypeScript, and from TypeScript toward stricter compiled languages. Rust is the end of that path — but it took some convincing to get there, and the thing that convinced me wasn't the systems programming story. It was the frontend.

The TypeScript Ceiling

TypeScript is an extraordinary tool within its constraints. The type system is expressive, the ecosystem is vast, and the developer experience — particularly with modern tooling — is genuinely good. But TypeScript erases at runtime. The types you write are a compile-time overlay on JavaScript; they do not exist when the code executes. The compiler can tell you when your model is inconsistent, but it cannot prevent every class of runtime failure.

SQLite in 2026

I wrote my first SQLite article in 2011 while debugging an Adobe AIR app. The problem was a quoting edge case; the solution was a one-liner. SQLite was a curiosity — a file-based database you used when you didn’t want to run a server.

Fifteen years later, SQLite is having a moment that few databases get to have. It’s not just embedded tooling anymore. It’s in the browser, at the edge, in production analytics pipelines, and increasingly, in vector search. The same engine, radically new contexts.