A man who joined the company as a software engineer while serving a sentence talks about his experience
Preston Thorpe, who works as a software engineer at database company Turso while serving time in a Maine prison, has written about his experiences in a blog post.
pthorpe92.dev/intro/my-story/
Working on databases from prison: How I got here, part 2.
https://turso.tech/blog/working-on-databases-from-prison
At the time of writing, Mr. Thorpe, 33, ran away from home after a conflict with his parents at the age of 17, and began selling drugs over the Internet, earning tens of thousands of dollars a week. However, at the age of 20, he was arrested for smuggling MDMA.
During his first prison stay, Thorpe said he was immersed in the negative prison culture, such as 'hatred of police officers and informants.' After his release, he had the option of taking a decent job paying $10.50 an hour, but he chose to return to the world of crime and was rearrested after 14 months of drug addiction and suffering. At the time of writing, his sentence began in May 2017, and at first he had completely lost hope for the future, spending nearly three years in solitary confinement in total.
The biggest turning point in Thorpe's life was his transfer to a prison in Maine. The prison had little influence from gangs, and for the first time, Thorpe was able to face himself and focus on self-improvement. He says he had a kind of 'enlightenment' and became truly ashamed of his past, which was full of drugs and crime.
This change prompted Thorpe to enroll in a university education program and study computer science. Thorpe decided to devote the rest of his sentence to studying computer science, and he studied for more than 12 hours a day for three years. When the internet was introduced in prison due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Thorpe's technical knowledge was useful.
In recognition of his contributions, Thorpe was granted remote work permission by his administration and was hired as a software engineer at
Later, on the social news site Hacker News, Thorpe discovered Project Limbo , an open source project started by database company Turso. This was an ambitious project to rewrite the widely used database SQLite from scratch, and Thorpe, who had been interested in storage engines from his previous experience working on cache-related projects, became interested in Project Limbo and became a contributor.
Thorpe, who had nothing to do in prison, spent about 90 hours a week coding and managing infrastructure, and the only way to relax was to watch technical YouTube videos for an hour every day. In particular, he often watched videos by The Primeagen , whose background overlaps with his own, and was greatly inspired by them. Thorpe, who had known about Turso for some time through The Primeagen's videos, recalls that he was nervous about having the founders look at his code because they were Linux kernel developers.
So Thorpe's life revolved around contributing to Limbo, while he also read SQLite source code, papers on databases, and took university courses. He was active on Turso's official Discord server, but no one knew that one of its top contributors was accessing it from prison.
Soon, Thorpe's contributions caught the eye of Turso co-founder and CEO Gloiber Costa, who invited Thorpe to come in for an interview on Discord. Costa posted about this on X (formerly Twitter), which introduced Thorpe to The Primeagen, which helped Thorpe become more widely known.
This Guy Really Did Something - YouTube
At the time of writing, Thorpe is working full time at Turso and is receiving his full salary. Thorpe is very happy and proud that a dream that was unimaginable a few years ago has come true. Although the recent court decision means he will not be released earlier than he had hoped, he said he has about 10 months left on his sentence at the time of writing and is optimistic that he will be able to focus on career advancement until his release.
In response to Thorpe's blog post, Hacker News posted a comment praising the Maine program, saying, 'Maine's remote work program is a very promising initiative in preventing recidivism. What's amazing is that it gives inmates real work and allows them to continue it seamlessly after release. Typically, once released , it's nearly impossible to find work, and time ticks by. This creates a sense of despair and leads to recidivism.'
Related Posts:
in Note, Posted by log1i_yk