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Best 15 SQLite Developers You Should Know

sqlite developers - Best 15 SQLite Developers You Should Know

SQLite’s astonishing ubiquity (billions of deployments) is driven by a small but brilliant community of developers and contributors.

Below is a ranked list of the top 15 individuals actively working with or contributing to SQLite in 2025. They were selected for their open-source contributions to SQLite’s code or extensions, technical influence, startup leadership (while still coding), community presence, roles at major companies using SQLite, and accolades in coding competitions – all weighted equally. Each person’s social profiles (LinkedIn, GitHub, Twitter, blog) are provided for reference.

Here is the updated list of the 15 best SQLite developers globally in 2025:

  1. Simon Willison
  2. Joe Mistachkin
  3. D. Richard Hipp
  4. Dan Kennedy
  5. Paweł Salawa
  6. Stephen Lombardo
  7. Joshua Wise
  8. James Long
  9. Glauber Costa
  10. Philip O’Toole
  11. Alex Garcia
  12. Dan Shearer
  13. Gerhard Häring
  14. Ben Johnson
  15. Taro L. Saito

Now, let’s delve deeper into their achievements and impact on SQLite:

Simon Willison

YouTube Video

Nationality: British

Simon Willison, co-creator of Django, has in recent years become a leading voice in promoting SQLite for data science and web applications.

He has written 294 blog posts tagged “SQLite” on his personal blog, exploring SQLite’s use as a “baked-in” database for deploying small web apps and data projects. Willison created tools like Datasette, which leverage SQLite to publish and query datasets, and sqlite-utils for Python scripting. Through conference talks, tutorials, and his Twitter account, he has popularized using SQLite in creative ways (e.g. for static websites, AI prompt caches). Willison’s influential blogging and projects have inspired many developers to realize the power of “small data” with SQLite.

Joe Mistachkin

Nationality: American

Joe Mistachkin was a member of the SQLite development team for many years.

He is the principal author of the official System.Data.SQLite ADO.NET provider, which brings SQLite to .NET applications. Mistachkin also contributed extensively to SQLite’s test suite and build scripts, leveraging his expertise in Tcl (he’s a Tcl/Tk maintainer). His work ensures SQLite is integrated into Python (via pysqlite) and .NET smoothly. Mistachkin released his code to the public domain, in line with SQLite’s ethos. He remains active in the community through his blog and social media, discussing SQLite improvements and usage.

D. Richard Hipp

D. Richard Hipp - Best 15 SQLite Developers You Should Know

Nationality: American

Richard “drh” Hipp released SQLite in 2000, and over two decades has guided it to become “the most widely deployed and used database in the world.”

He and his small team have written over 99% of SQLite’s code, maintaining its reputation for reliability and cross-platform portability. Hipp also created the Fossil DVCS used for SQLite’s development. He is known for SQLite’s unique public-domain licensing and a philosophy of keeping the library small, fast, and serverless. Under his leadership, SQLite earned “aviation-grade” testing rigor and is integrated into countless operating systems and applications worldwide.

Dan Kennedy

Nationality: Australian

An Australian based in Thailand, Dan Kennedy has co-authored SQLite since the early 2000s, contributing nearly as much code as Hipp.

He is recognized for implementing critical features like window functions, JSON support, and the full-text search extensions (FTS3/FTS5). Kennedy is also a frequent problem-solver on the SQLite forum, addressing bug reports and SQL edge cases. His deep understanding of SQLite’s internals and decades of commits make him one of its most indispensable developers.

Paweł Salawa

Nationality: Polish

Paweł Salawa is the Polish developer of SQLiteStudio, a free, cross-platform GUI for browsing and editing SQLite databases.

He started SQLiteStudio in the mid-2000s and has single-handedly developed it using C++/Qt. The tool features a table editor, query executor, import/export wizards, and plugin support. Salawa’s SQLiteStudio has become a go-to graphical client for SQLite users (especially on Linux, where it’s packaged in many distros). He actively maintains the project, releasing updates and responding to user issues on GitHub. By providing a robust GUI, Salawa has made SQLite more accessible to those who prefer visual database management, significantly contributing to SQLite’s user-friendliness.

Stephen Lombardo

Stephen Lombardo - Best 15 SQLite Developers You Should Know

Nationality: American

Stephen Lombardo is the primary developer of SQLCipher, the popular extension that provides transparent AES-256 encryption for SQLite databases.

He founded Zetetic LLC and released SQLCipher in 2008, enabling secure data storage for mobile and desktop applications. Lombardo’s work on SQLCipher involved modifying SQLite’s pager to encrypt/decrypt pages on the fly, while otherwise preserving full SQLite compatibility. Today, SQLCipher is used in iOS, Android, and many apps that require encrypted local storage. Lombardo also oversaw SQLCipher’s FIPS 140-2 validation. He remains active in maintaining SQLCipher and supporting enterprise clients. By marrying SQLite’s simplicity with strong security, Lombardo greatly broadened SQLite’s appeal for sensitive data applications.

Joshua Wise

Nationality: American

Joshua Wise is the author of better-sqlite3, a high-performance Node.js module for SQLite.

Dissatisfied with existing async SQLite bindings, Wise created better-sqlite3 to be synchronous, faster, and simpler to use. It became known as “the fastest and simplest library for SQLite in Node.js.” On npm, better-sqlite3 is widely adopted for Node applications needing efficient database access. Wise has maintained the project for years, keeping it up-to-date with SQLite releases (v3.49 as of 2025). He also developed other low-level libraries (his GitHub “WiseLibs” hosts multiple projects). By optimizing the SQLite bindings for Node, Wise enabled JavaScript developers to fully leverage SQLite’s speed.

James Long

SQLite running inside the browser sounds absurd — until you realize how powerful it is.

Nationality: American

James Long gained recognition for his 2019 experiment “AbsurdSQL”, which managed to run the SQLite engine inside the browser by using a virtual filesystem on top of IndexedDB.

Long wrote a widely-read blog post “SQLite Wasm + IndexedDB: a love story” describing how he compiled SQLite to WebAssembly and achieved a persistent client-side database in web apps. This approach was later adopted by frameworks like Meta’s React Native and experimental browser plugins. Long, formerly at Mozilla, is an expert in web dev tooling. He also created Postlighter and Prettier. His AbsurdSQL proof-of-concept showed the potential of SQLite for offline-first web applications, and influenced official SQLite WASM efforts.

Glauber Costa

Glauber Costa - Best 15 SQLite Developers You Should Know

Nationality: Brazilian

Glauber Costa is the co-founder of Turso (ChiselStrike) and co-creator of libSQL, the open-source fork of SQLite.

A former ScyllaDB developer, Costa launched libSQL in 2022 as a fully open, community-driven SQLite, adding features like bottomless replication. He spearheads Turso, a cloud service for edge-hosted SQLite with global replication. Costa has been rewriting parts of SQLite in Rust (project “libSQL with async I/O”) to improve safety. Under his leadership, libSQL has rapidly grown, and Turso raised funding to build “SQLite-as-a-service.” Costa’s startup background and advocacy for SQLite in distributed environments make him a prominent figure shaping SQLite’s future in serverless and edge computing.

Philip O’Toole

Nationality: Irish

Philip O’Toole is the software engineer who created rqlite, an open-source project that turns SQLite into a lightweight distributed database.

Started in 2014, rqlite layers a Raft consensus replication on top of SQLite, automatically replicating SQL statements to multiple nodes for fault tolerance. O’Toole (an ex-Performance Engineer at Bloomberg) built rqlite in Go and has guided it through many releases; version 6.x can replicate SQLite across clusters easily. He remains the lead maintainer of rqlite, which has thousands of GitHub stars. O’Toole frequently blogs about rqlite’s design and performance. His work demonstrated how far SQLite can scale in distributed systems, influencing projects like dqlite.

Alex Garcia

Alex Garcia - Best 15 SQLite Developers You Should Know

Nationality: American

Alex Garcia is a software developer known for creating and sharing innovative SQLite extensions.

In 2023–2024 he developed sqlite-vec, which adds efficient vector similarity search (for AI/ML embeddings) to SQLite, allowing hybrid search combining full-text and vector search. He’s also behind sqlite-html, an extension for parsing and querying HTML/XML within SQLite. Garcia often collaborates with the SQLite community (e.g., he worked with Hugging Face on using SQLite for AI data stores). He actively writes about these on his blog and demonstrates them on Twitter – where he shares tips on writing custom C extensions for SQLite. Through his work, Garcia is expanding SQLite into domains like machine learning and web scraping.

Dan Shearer

Nationality: Australian

Dan Shearer is an open-source technologist heading LumoSQL, an experimental fork that explores blending SQLite with alternative storage engines (like LMDB) and adding features such as built-in encryption and decentralized sync.

Launched in 2019, LumoSQL aims to “evolve” SQLite while remaining compatible. Shearer’s team has published benchmarks and prototypes integrating pluggable storage backends into SQLite. A long-time contributor to projects like Samba, Shearer brings decades of open-source experience. He speaks at conferences (e.g. FOSDEM) about the importance of SQLite and the need for innovation in embedded databases. While not (yet) in production use, LumoSQL under Shearer’s guidance serves as a testbed influencing SQLite’s ecosystem (some extension ideas have been adopted into core or other forks).

Gerhard Häring

Nationality: German

Gerhard Häring wrote pysqlite, the original SQLite driver for Python’s DB-API 2.0. Developed in 2004–2006, pysqlite provided Python with a reliable interface to SQLite and was eventually included in Python’s standard library as the sqlite3 module.

Häring’s work thus brought SQLite to every Python installation. He ensured pysqlite exposed SQLite’s functionality cleanly in Python and handled types conversion. Beyond that, Häring has contributed to other open-source (he’s known in the Python and C++ communities). On GitHub he still maintains pysqlite as a separate project for newer SQLite features. His early contribution of SQLite integration in Python was fundamental to SQLite’s spread in the data science and automation domains.

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson - Best 15 SQLite Developers You Should Know

Nationality: American

Ben Johnson is known for creating Litestream, an open-source tool that continuously replicates SQLite databases to cloud storage.

Launched in 2020, Litestream hooks into SQLite’s write-ahead log to stream backups (e.g. to AWS S3), providing disaster recovery for serverless apps using SQLite. Johnson’s vision of “SQLite in the cloud” led Fly.io to acquire Litestream in 2021. At Fly.io, he continued to develop LiteFS, a distributed file system for SQLite, allowing multi-region replicated SQLite instances. Previously, Johnson created the BoltDB embedded database. He frequently writes about database internals and promotes using SQLite for production web services. His work enables developers to confidently deploy SQLite-backed apps with high availability.

Taro L. Saito

Nationality: Japanese

Taro Saito leads the development of SQLite JDBC in the Xerial project.

This library enables Java applications to use SQLite via the JDBC API, by bundling native SQLite libraries for each platform. Saito forked and improved the original SQLiteJDBC (from Zentus) and has maintained it for years. Under his stewardship, SQLite JDBC added support for the latest SQLite features and for Spatialite, while simplifying deployment with an all-in-one JAR. It’s heavily used in the Java ecosystem (e.g. in Android SDK and many desktop apps). “SQLite JDBC, developed by Taro L. Saito, is a library for accessing SQLite database files in Java,” notes the Debian package info. Saito’s work ensures that the Java world can seamlessly integrate SQLite with minimal effort.

Wrap Up

These legends represent exceptional talent, making them extremely challenging to headhunt. However, there are thousands of other highly skilled IT professionals available to hire with our help. Contact us, and we will be happy to discuss your hiring needs.

Note: We’ve dedicated significant time and effort to creating and verifying this curated list of top talent. However, if you believe a correction or addition is needed, feel free to reach out. We’ll gladly review and update the page.

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