256 Lights partnered with RunReveal to create pql, an open source query language that translates a simple pipeline language into database-agnostic SQL. After discussing RunReveal’s requirements, 256 Lights designed and implemented a custom parser and transpiler, with a special focus on user experience. 256 Lights held weekly meetings with RunReveal to present results and iterate on features, prioritizing the most impactful work. Within pql’s first week of release, it made it to the first page of Hacker News and currently has over 600 stars on GitHub.

Over time, 256 Lights has worked with RunReveal on other open source projects, including:

• Sigma Lite, a pure Go implementation of the Sigma detection format with an extensive test suite and a built-in evaluation engine.
• reveald, a configurable telemetry collection agent. 256 Lights built an eBPF backend to detect process execution and outbound network requests.
• kawa, a stream-processing library for Go.

256 Lights helped Kagi build their Kagi Mail service frontend. Kagi had an existing product concept that they wanted to bring to trusted testers. Over the course of six months, 256 Lights worked with Kagi’s UX design team and product management to build a production-ready frontend using TypeScript, Go, and Stimulus. To meet the product vision, the frontend had strict bandwidth and latency concerns. 256 Lights ensured that the user interface would:

• render its views identically in the server and the client,
• have an initial JavaScript bundle of <25 kilobytes, and
• have browsers communicate directly with the JMAP backend.

As a part of this effort, 256 Lights developed and open-sourced mustache-codegen, a lightning fast code generator for the Mustache templating language. Between this and other code health improvements, 256 Lights reduced the developer iteration cycle from minutes to seconds.

As the project reached completion, 256 Lights advised Kagi on how to structure Kagi Mail’s engineering team for success in scaling the product from trusted tester to general availability. 256 Lights reviewed the job descriptions and assisted in hiring software engineers to expand the engineering team. 256 Lights ensured that development processes were documented (and automated, where applicable) and using standardized tooling so that future engineers could ramp up quickly.

Prior to 256 Lights, Roxy Light has started multiple successful open source projects:

• zombiezen.com/go/sqlite
• Go Cloud
• Wire

In addition, Roxy has contributed to many popular open source projects, including Go, Protocol Buffers, and Tailscale.