You Should Reinvent the Wheel. The Artisan of the Day Is Thiery Laverdure.
When Thiery Laverdure saw Laravel Echo's JavaScript codebase, he saw the potential for a Laravel-style, swappable driver system to expand developer choice. His next move wasn’t to file an issue or wait for permission. He rewrote the entire package in TypeScript and delivered a 3,000-line pull request that, at the time, Taylor had to just trust was the right solution.
Thiery is a web developer from Atlanta, Georgia, founder of Space Studio (a venture building company), and the creator of Litebase, an open-source distributed database built on SQLite. He recently gave his talk “You Should Reinvent the Wheel” at Laracon US. He's a jazz musician turned developer, a polymath who watches people and learns, and someone who spent years in "the shed" perfecting his craft.
He embodies the entrepreneurial spirit of the Laravel community: always buying domain names, always dreaming of the next unicorn, always willing to go down the rabbit hole because the learning is worth it, whether the project ships or not.
Much like TJ Miller with Prism and Mary Perry with design patterns, Thiery represents developers who aren't afraid to go deep, learn hard things, and share their knowledge with the community.
Reinvent the Wheel: Ship It ‘Til You Make It
Over his talk at Laracon, Thiery argued that developers shouldn’t be scared of reinventing things; they should embrace it as a path to value creation.
Here’s Thiery's philosophy on reinvention:
1. Learning Through Mimicry
Like jazz musicians transcribing solos note for note, developers learn by studying how others solved problems, then making it their own.
2. The Progression Matters
Self-doubt to self-development to self-confidence. "I don't think I can do it" becomes "I'm learning how to do it" becomes "I know how to do it."
3. There's Nothing New Under the Sun
Most development boils down to storing and retrieving text from databases. But that doesn't mean we stop innovating. We keep refining because it works.
4. The Work Is Still in Progress
We don't have to accept the tools we're given. Every day brings new possibilities for improvement.
The Litebase Story: Five Years of Reinvention
As Thiery became more immersed in the Laravel community, he began to mimic the builders around him, adopting, for example, Taylor Otwell’s “scratch my own itch” mentality. After attending Laracon in 2019, he started to put this philosophy into practice by creating Litebase.
- The problem: Making SQLite work reliably for distributed applications, allowing multiple app servers to talk to the same SQLite database as if running on the same machine.
- First attempt (2019): Naive approach using AWS Elastic File System. Lesson learned: Network file systems don't support memory-mapped files that SQLite needs.
- Getting back in the shed: Thiery spent years learning, failing, seeing other companies ship similar ideas, but pressing on because "who cares if you're late to the party."
- The breakthrough: Litebase Server and Litebase DFS to solve distributed system challenges with SQLite using a structured log architecture that includes versioned write-ahead logs, page logs, and dynamic data ranges scattered across object storage.
- Laravel integration: Built with Laravel in mind from day one, not as an afterthought. Custom database connection class, HTTP-based queries, and even a custom binary protocol (LQTP) for blazing performance.
- The results: Migration benchmarks showing Litebase at 450 ms (vs MySQL's 700 ms, SQLite's 230 ms), then optimized to 300 ms with the custom protocol.
What drives Thiery’s philosophy is the belief that success isn't the only measure of value. As Quincy Jones was taught, we’re all limited to the same 12 notes, but by staying curious about how others use them, we can learn, adapt, and create something truly our own.
"You should reinvent the wheel if you want to learn something new, if you want to improve existing ideas, if you want to create simpler abstractions, if you want to innovate and disrupt the status quo," he said.
Summing it up with a jazz musician's motto: if you mess up, just keep going.
Your Story Belongs Here
You don't need to have a course, a talk, or a big launch. If Laravel has been part of your journey (a pivot, a side project, a moment of growth), we'd love to hear about it!
Answer Taylor's questions at laravel.com/stories.
We're always looking to feature developers from every corner of the community. Beginners, builders, behind-the-scenes folks. If Laravel helped you do something you're proud of, that's a story worth telling.