Hi, I'm Nikita Volkov - architect, consultant, and the author of hasql , one of the two main PostgreSQL drivers in Haskell used in major production projects like PostgREST and IHP. After 25 years in IT and more late-night schema-drift fires than I care to count, I open-sourced something I wish had existed a decade ago: pGenie .

Following is the story of how I went from shipping a popular ORM in 2012... to throwing it all away... to realizing that the database itself should be the single source of truth.

2012: I Built an ORM

Back then I was a typical web developer of the time. CRUD was all we needed. Performance problems were for "later". Deployments were ssh + git pull . Migrations were non-existent.

So I wrote SORM - an ORM framework for Scala - and open-sourced it. Instead of treating objects as mutable views of the database, it exchanged them as immutable values with the db. It felt novel. It gained traction.…