In an industry that tells us to never reinvent the wheel, Thiery Laverdure did the unthinkable: he built a distributed database from scratch. By blending the improvisational lessons of jazz with deep systems engineering, he created Litebase, a tool that brings SQLite to the distributed cloud. This is the story of how 'wasting time' on custom protocols and file systems leads to the breakthroughs that standard libraries can't provide.