Jeronimo Irazabal, immudb Co-Founder, the Vision & the Fascination of Immutable Data

Could you please tell us about yourself?

The areas I'm passionate about are databases, applied cryptography, and distributed systems. I feel very fortunate to have a wonderful family and to work on topics I enjoy. As a sports enthusiast and fruit freak, I eat a lot of fruit.

The Code

Why did you start your project? What problems does it solve?

immudb was started to fill the growing gap between traditional databases and blockchain technology. Blockchain technology provides data verification, trusted data versioning and integrity at the cost of performance and an increased level of complexity.

Furthermore, users were missing backup and restore capabilities, SQL standard, blob storage and much more. With immudb we developed a best of both worlds mix, a K/V+SQL database that runs lightning fast, supports large volumes of data, can be embedded and provides cryptographic data verification for its clients.

What was your key driving force in starting your project?

The fascination of immutable data, where it is needed and valuable and eventually my vision of the future with tamper resistant information.

Do you have a business model for your project?

When we noticed that more and more companies and projects used immudb to provide serious applications we decided to provide commercial support plans. Running an immutable data structure with client-verifiability comes with important design and operational questions. We support companies in the planning and design phase, custom development and operational tasks.

What is the most challenging technical problem you faced when building your project, so far?

It was quite challenging to design and build the underlying key-value store with built-in verification capabilities. With the project maturing, several critical problems had to be overcome, including performance concerns and maintenance tasks.

What is the most challenging non-technical problem you faced when building your project, so far?

Spreading immudb is the most challenging non-technical challenge. The technology is relatively new, and we believe it will be included in many interesting use cases dealing with sensitive data in the future.

What is your vision of the project? How do you see it in 5 years?

immudb has proven stable in environments with high loads. In addition to being a secondary database, it can also be used as a primary database. immudb will continue to lead the way in database verification in the future.

The use of immudb is becoming easier with each release. Simplicity is our goal while dealing with complexity under the hood.

What is the best way for a developer to contribute to your project?

We welcome any type of contribution: asking questions, reporting issues, sharing examples, improving documentation, fixing issues or proposing new features.

We have an active Discord channel.

Where can we go to know more about what you’re building?

In our company’s blog, you can find news about immudb or projects using it.

My personal GitHub account: https://github.com/jeroiraz

The Human

Can you give an example of an early lesson in life that helped shape who you are today?

Life can be shorter than you can imagine. My mother passed away during my first year at university. One of her last pieces of advice to me was to avoid getting into too much trouble about things, but to make sure I did them correctly.

It is essential to do things well, but to find joy along the way as well.

What is your favorite stack?

I work as a system or backend developer. In other areas, I'm terrible.

As a developer, what are the productivity tools that made your life easier?

As a pragmatic developer, I felt in love with Go toolset, that in conjunction with GitHub actions are the critical tools I need.

What are you currently learning?

I keep learning about storage and distributed systems. Other than that, this 2022 I started swimming in cold water.

If you had to share one advice developers should follow, what would it be?

Think high-level about the problem they are solving, it's better to start with a flexible design, foreseeing evolution, and delimiting boundaries. I take a significant amount of time before actually coding.

If you had to suggest one person developers should follow, who would it be?

I'd suggest Andy Pavlo.

If you had to share one book developers should read, what would it be?

One book that had a significant influence in design skill was "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" by Erich Gamma, et al.

I also found "Applied Cryptography" by Bruce Schneier quite interesting.

Thank you!

Thank you so much for letting me share about our project and personal experiences with you.