I build a lot of things I'll probably never ship. Small personal tools, prototypes, local utilities: a genealogy tracker, an expense tracker, a file indexer, the odd mini-game. Most of them start the same way: JavaScript or TypeScript, because nothing beats it for moving fast and staying flexible while an idea is still taking shape.
The one thing that kept getting in the way was storage.
So I built a single-file document database for Node.js: no server, no native bindings, a MongoDB-style API, and append-only writes.
Two options, both wrong for me
Running a real database server for a weekend prototype is overkill, and it gets worse the moment I want to move a tool between machines or share it with a copy-paste. So in practice I had two options.
