The HeliosDB Champions program recognizes and equips developers who help others succeed with HeliosDB: answering questions, writing honest guides, building integrations, giving talks, filing good bugs. It is not a paid influencer network and there is no referral link.
A champion's job is to make other developers successful with HeliosDB, not to inflate metrics. A tutorial that honestly says "this is not reliable yet, here is the workaround" is worth more than ten hype posts.
HeliosDB's voice is concrete and honest. Champions inherit that. We would rather you publish a true limitation than a fake benchmark. The guardrails below are mandatory.
We do not buy reach, invent benchmarks or claim customers we do not have. Comparative claims must be defensible against the docs.
No fixed headcount, no quota. Tiers are reviewed quarterly and reflect recent, real activity. Inactivity is not punished; life happens.
Anyone active: a merged PR, one published tutorial or guide, or a track record of helpful answers.
About three months of sustained help: multiple guides, integrations or talks, or consistently high-signal support and bug reports.
A year or more of Champion-level work, or a foundational contribution: a major integration, an SDK, a canonical doc.
Pick what fits you. Nobody does all of it.
Answer questions on Discord, GitHub Discussions and Stack Overflow. Reproduce and file clean bug reports.
Tutorials, migration write-ups from SQLite, PostgreSQL or MySQL, benchmarks with reproduction recipes, comparison posts that are fair to alternatives.
Wire HeliosDB into a tool or framework and write the guide: an ORM, n8n, a CI pipeline, an MCP-aware agent.
Meetups, conference talks, livestreams, office hours.
Improve an SDK, an ORM compatibility shim, a deploy template or an agent skill file.
Roadmap input, early-build testing, "this error message confused me" reports. High value, low effort.
The docs hub, the agent skill bundles shipped with every product, llms.txt for AI-assisted authoring, fair comparison pages to cite, and a direct line to the maintainers.
This page, Discord roles, release-note credit, named docs credit for Emeritus. Early access to preview builds and the roadmap. Amplification of your content on the official channels when it is accurate.
Pay per post, run a referral-link bounty, or gate rewards behind vanity metrics. Companies that want to resell or refer HeliosDB commercially belong in the partner program, which is a separate track with its own agreement.
Point people at the documented install paths for each product and nothing else. Client SDKs are not the engine.
If a feature is marked experimental or unreliable in the docs, say so and show the workaround. Never tell users to rely on it in production.
Use only performance numbers published in the docs, framed as measured on representative fixtures, and link the reproduction. No invented logos.
We win on substance. Comparative claims must be defensible against the docs of both products.
No sock-puppet praise, no mass link drops, no fake reviews. Your own real experience is what people trust.
Unsure whether a claim is safe? Ask in the maintainers channel. We would rather pre-clear it than retract it.
HeliosDB Nano speaks the native PostgreSQL wire protocol, so a stock driver works unchanged. Install, start, connect, run real SQL, then write it up honestly and submit the link.
Install Nano from crates.io or a prebuilt GitHub release binary, then start it with a data directory. PostgreSQL wire on 5432, MySQL wire on 3306, REST on 8080 from one process.
cargo install heliosdb-nano --locked
heliosdb-nano start --data-dir ./demo --mysqlNo HeliosDB-specific client needed. Create a table, insert with RETURNING, read it back.
import psycopg2
conn = psycopg2.connect(host="127.0.0.1", port=5432, user="postgres", dbname="postgres")
cur = conn.cursor()
cur.execute("CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS products (id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY, name TEXT, price DECIMAL(10,2))")
cur.execute("INSERT INTO products (name, price) VALUES (%s, %s) RETURNING id", ("Widget", 9.99))Read the same rows over REST or psql to show the multi-protocol surface, keep any limitation you hit visible, link the docs, and post the published guide in the Discord champions channel or a GitHub Discussion for review.
curl "http://localhost:8080/rest/v1/products?price=lt.15&select=id,name,price"Full walkthrough and MCP variant in the Nano docs.
Maintainers and existing champions watch the community. If you are consistently helpful and accurate, you will be invited. Nothing to do but keep being useful.
Use the form below, open a GitHub Discussion, or post in the Discord champions channel with who you are, one to three concrete things you have shipped for HeliosDB users, and what you want to work on next. A maintainer responds within about a week; we would rather say "not yet, here is what would tip it" than ghost you.
Contribution stats (merged pull requests, issues, lines changed over time) will appear here for everyone listed.
This is not a paid referral program. If you want to resell or refer HeliosDB commercially, see the partner program instead.
Accuracy first, then usefulness. A submitted guide with invented benchmarks, a fabricated customer or a feature claim the docs contradict is a hard no; fix it and resubmit.
A maintainer replies within about a week with a yes, a not-yet with what would tip it, or a pointer to the partner program if that is the better fit.
Step back any time; recognition you earned stays. Removal happens only for fabricated benchmarks or customers, repeated claims that contradict the guardrails after correction, harassment or astroturfing.
Discord or a GitHub issue work just as well.
Launches are moments. The mission is helping people ship with HeliosDB.