Why We Started Makeshift Engineering
The story behind a group of friends who decided to build things together, on their own terms.
This isn’t a startup. There’s no pitch deck, no runway, no “disruption” narrative.
Makeshift Engineering is a group of friends who like to build things. That’s it.
How It Started
It started with a conversation: “What if we just… built stuff together?”
We’d all been working on side projects in isolation. A database experiment here. A CLI tool there. The kind of thing you hack on at 2 AM because the problem is interesting, not because someone’s paying you.
The realization was simple: building alone is fun. Building together is better.
So we made it official. Not with incorporation papers — with a GitHub org and a domain name.
What We Believe
Open Source First
Everything we build is open source. Not as a marketing strategy. Not as a community play. Because the software we’ve learned the most from has always been open source. We want to contribute to that.
Depth Over Breadth
We’re not interested in shipping a dozen half-baked tools. We’d rather build one thing properly. Right now, that’s PenguinDB — an LSM-tree based SQL database engine in Go. It touches storage engines, query parsing, query planning, compaction, crash recovery. It’s the kind of project where you learn something new every week.
No Corporate Nonsense
No sprints. No standups. No story points. No “alignment meetings.”
We build when we’re excited to build. We review each other’s code because we want it to be good, not because a process says we have to. We argue about B-trees vs. LSM-trees at midnight because that’s genuinely fun.
What’s Next
We’re going to keep building PenguinDB. We’re going to write about what we learn — deep technical posts about database internals, storage engines, parsers, and the engineering decisions behind the code.
We’re also going to build other things. Developer tools. Systems software. Things that solve problems we actually have.
If any of that sounds interesting, star us on GitHub or subscribe to the RSS feed. We’ll be here, building.
— The Makeshift Team