Inside this issue

• 2024 recap

• Community events recap

• Interesting reads

• Updates from the industry

2024 recap

From start to finish, 2024 was packed with milestones, challenges, and plenty of memorable moments. As we reflected during our Christmas party, a few standout quotes emerged—each offering a little insight into the journey we’ve been on. Here’s a glimpse into the heart of Quesma, straight from the team:

• Krzysiek Kiewicz, Founding Engineer: "I’m not a big fan of fancy statements, unlike some tech execs. But thorough tests save coders’ lives—literally. On one of my previous projects, correctness was critical, yet we had zero automatic tests. I wondered, are tests overrated? At Quesma, we took the opposite approach from day one: I wrote hundreds of tests in a year. Not only did they make me faster, but my stress levels—and number of gray hairs—are way lower."

• Rafał Strzaliński, Founding Engineer: “Trees and parsers are often dismissed as just LeetCode exercises. At Quesma, we deal with the real thing—the messy, complicated code that actually matters.”

• Jacek Migdał, Co-founder and CEO: “In 2024, we faced our share of snarky HN comments like, ‘No offense, but it’s astonishing how much faffing about leads to, “Woo! We raised money and are building a team.”’ But while the critics were busy typing, we were busy writing code, launching, and—most importantly—finding users and customers. Actions speak louder than comments.”

• Przemysław Hejman, Founding Engineer: “Delivering at this pace requires compromises and careful tech debt management. Knowing when to take it on and when to pay it off is an underrated skill. Engineering excellence is worth striving for—but expecting it all the time? That’s just bullshit.”

• Przemysław Delewski, Founding Engineer: “Greenfield projects are challenging, but it’s the kind of challenge I thrive on. I love working in environments that push their teams, offering signals and opportunities to grow. Quesma has been exactly that—a place where you’re encouraged to stretch your skills and capabilities.”

• Piotr Grabowski, Founding Engineer: “The real challenge isn’t launching big features—it’s the grind of perfecting every little detail. The last couple of months changed my perspective as we polished every aspect, even the rarely used functions, to make our product easy to understand, use, and configure.”

• Paweł Brzoska, Co-founder and CPO: “2024? A year of ideas, customer conversations, and countless product dilemmas. We launched Quesma, our innovative database gateway, and grew more and more convinced it’s the next big thing. What a ride!”

• Antoni Olendzki, GTM: “Devs are refreshingly candid and not the easiest to convince. One time, I got a blunt ‘f*** off’ in response to a cold DM—saved me the trouble of any follow-ups! 😅”

Community events recap

Our CEO, Jacek, took the stage at the PGE Arena in Warsaw to share what’s new in data platforms for 2024. The room was packed, the insights were sharp, and the energy was high. Check out the slides here.

Our Founding Engineer, Przemysław Hejman, and GTM guy, Antoni Olendzki, joined Elastic Day Poland to connect with Elastic enthusiasts. We brought some unexpected (but welcome!) energy to the event, sharing how Quesma helps companies supercharge their Kibana dashboards.

With Quesma, you can keep your trusty Kibana setup while seamlessly tapping into the power of modern, high-performance databases like ClickHouse and Hydrolix—no migration headaches required.

Bonus: any Elasticsearch-API compatible app can join the party too. Huge thanks to the Elastic crew for hosting such a great day!

Interesting reads

SQLite, but faster. Avi Aryan’s deep dive into speeding up SQLite is a must-read for anyone dealing with lightweight databases. From benchmarking to practical optimizations, it’s a treasure trove of tips for squeezing out more performance. Read the full breakdown here.

Updates from the industry

• Many DB stocks are rebounding. Snowflake rockets 32%, its best day ever, after earnings beat.

• The Iceberg ecosystem is heating up. New startups like Bemi are popping up, and nearly every vendor at this year’s KubeCon has it on their short-term roadmap. Storage is getting unified—finally.

• Amazon S3 goes all-in on Iceberg. AWS now supports Apache Iceberg tables natively, pushing the industry closer to solving the headache of data duplication in storage. Zero-clone copying is quickly becoming the new standard for analytics workloads. Learn more here.

• Discover GitHub like never before. Anvaka’s Map of GitHub is an interactive visual tool that maps out projects and their connections across the platform. It’s a fascinating way to explore open-source ecosystems, spot trends, and maybe even stumble upon your next favorite repo. Check it out here.

• The true cost of failure. Silicon Continent explores why startups underestimate the price of failure and how those overlooked costs ripple through teams, products, and morale. A thought-provoking read for anyone in the trenches of building. Dive into it here.

• Scoop: Based on our intel, AI agents are on track to evolve much like multimodal AI did—think 6 to 24 months. Right now, the tech is still in its diapers; most so-called “agents” aren’t much more than glorified chain-of-thought models. But foundational teams are hard at work closing the gaps. Watch this space.