The 80 days challenge

I wanted something very simple, easily auditable by IT professionals, so I set myself an arbitrary target: the first version had to be ready on Friday, 28th August 2026.

It was. openglacier v1 was released on that date, after 80 days of work.

Those 80 days did not start from a blank page. They took up the first concepts of openglacier, defined in 2023, and the road from there went through three engines:

1. A query caching engine. At the origin, openglacier was only that: a layer keeping the results of queries.
2. A small transactional engine, built on redb, an embedded key-value store written in pure Rust. A project I like very much.
3. A pure event-driven database engine, with its own persistent storage backend, Glacier: today’s openglacier-core, on which glacierdb is built.

Each step kept what the previous one had taught, and the result is still meant to stay small enough to be read, understood and audited.