Two projects, one mission - hackorum and pginbox join forces

Last week, Zsolt and I jumped on a call with someone who had been building something remarkably similar to what we had been working on, completely independently. That someone is Jack Bonatakis, the creator of pginbox.dev, and that call turned into one of the most energizing conversations we’ve had since launching hackorum.dev.

Two builders, one problem

When we launched Hackorum back in January, the goal was simple but important: make the pg-hackers mailing list actually readable. The list is the heartbeat of PostgreSQL core development, patches are proposed, debated, iterated on, and committed entirely through it. But the interface? Decades-old email threads. Dense, fast-moving, and not exactly welcoming to newcomers or even experienced contributors trying to manage the volume.

We built Hackorum to change that, a forum-style, read-only web view with commitfest integration, contributor profiles, read tracking, shared team notes, and more. Something that respects the existing email-based workflow while dramatically lowering the barrier to follow along.

Jack didn’t know at the time was that hackorum.dev existed but he reached the exact same conclusion, independently, and had already started building his own answer: pginbox.dev.

Who is Jack?

Jack Bonatakis is a Principal Software Engineer focused on Data & Insights, based in Washington, D.C and currently working at Robin, a Boston-based startup. His professional background spans data engineering, cloud analytics, and building data-driven platforms, with stints at MITRE working on government-sector data solutions, as well as roles at Rhino Insurance and DAS42, a cloud analytics consultancy. He holds a Master’s degree from the University of Colorado Boulder and has built a career on turning complex, noisy data into something people can actually use.

Which makes it completely unsurprising that he looked at the pg-hackers mailing list, one of the most information-dense, high-volume technical discussions on the internet, and thought: this could be so much better.

That instinct led him to build pginbox.dev: his own take on giving PostgreSQL’s mailing list ecosystem a more modern, inbox-style interface. He built it almost immediately after we published our first blog post about Hackorum. We were first, but only just. And the fact that two completely separate teams arrived at the same idea, at nearly the same time, with similar approaches, says something important about how real and widely felt this problem is.

Joining forces

When we got on the call with Jack, there was no awkwardness about the overlap. Quite the opposite, we spent most of the time excitedly comparing notes on what we’d each built, what worked, what didn’t, and where we wanted to take things. The conversation made it obvious pretty quickly that running two separate tools for the same community didn’t serve anyone well.

So we made the call together: pginbox.dev will be sunset, and Jack will be joining the Hackorum project going forward. One project, a stronger team, and a clearer path for the PostgreSQL community.

This is exactly what open source is supposed to feel like. Not a race, not a territory dispute, people who cared enough to build something from scratch, discovering they’d be stronger together than apart, and choosing collaboration over competition without a second thought. We’re not building Hackorum for any single company or any individual’s portfolio. We’re building something that should last, something genuinely useful to the PostgreSQL community for years to come. A more inclusive, more navigable hacker future, built together.

Welcome to the team, Jack. We’re genuinely glad you built what you built. And we’re even more glad you’re building the next chapter with us working on hackorum.dev

If you haven’t tried Hackorum yet, visit hackorum.dev. And if you want to get involved, here’s how:

• 💬 Join the conversation and hop into our Hackorum Discord channel to ask questions, share ideas, or just follow along as we build.
• 🛠️ Explore the code, everything is open source and available on GitHub.
• 🐛 Report a bug or request a feature, we track everything in the our GitHub Issues.