What This Story Taught Me

1. Start with a real pain

• Krakatoa began as a production necessity
• The problem was urgent and concrete
• That made the first version easy to validate

2. Design for the workload

• Billions of points changed the architecture
• General-purpose tools were not enough
• A focused renderer beat generic solutions

3. Great tools keep evolving

• Others extended Krakatoa after I left
• The core concept survived multiple generations
• The tool's legacy now includes open source