The Church of the TigerBeetle: When Tech Evangelism Becomes Faith
Church of the TigerBeetle: A Look at Tech Evangelism
At the Systems Distributed 2026 conference, Adam Wespiser witnesses a TigerBeetle talk that feels more like a sermon than a technical presentation—complete with origin myth, testimonials, and orchestral music. While acknowledging TigerBeetle's technical achievements, he argues that evangelism in tech is harmful: it trains people to hold beliefs by faith rather than reasoning, suppresses dissent, and creates brittle conviction. Drawing parallels to his experience with Haskell, he calls for letting work stand on its merits, showing receipts, and empowering people with facts and reason.
The problem is the claims made on faith—claims made without introspection, without proof, presented to you one after another without a moment in between to digest and integrate them into your current belief system, and set to emotional background music.
- mrkeen
This article is no better than what it criticises.
Passing a Jepsen test is great, but saying that you passed a Jepsen test is apparently some kind of hollow performance art, which has nothing to do with writing software?
They've been putting out high quality detailed information for years. It's not their fault if you attended a cinematic fluff piece.
- tolugenius
> The other place I’ve seen tech evangelism is in Haskell, specifically the belief that strongly typed programs are a better way to build software.
Interesting, I'm newer to the field so I say I saw this more particularly with the rewrite in rust crowd, yes rust does have certain aspects better than cpp but does not mean every cpp project would benefit from a rust rewrite. Also is the claim on strongly type programs true? like is it better overall or just better given some specific points?
- elktown
Hmm, it’s a conference talk? Conferences are for networking and promotion.
Furthermore, considering the current state of affairs in software dev, anyone evangelising software quality is going to get some benefit of the doubt from me.