I am a first-year CS student and I recently made a decision that most people around me think is unnecessary — I am building a relational database storage engine from scratch in raw C++, with zero STL dependency. No std::vector. No std::string. No iostream. Nothing. The Problem With How I Was Learning For a long time I was writing code that worked but I had no idea why it worked. I used abstractions, APIs, and libraries that hid everything interesting. I could build things but I couldn't explain what was actually happening in memory, on disk, or at the hardware level. What NanoDB Actually Is Why Ban the STL? Because the STL solves problems I haven't suffered through yet. If I use std::vector before I understand dynamic memory allocation, I learn nothing about what std::vector actually does. The restriction forces me to feel the pain that the abstractions were hiding. That pain is the education. I will be documenting every phase here — what I built, what broke, what I learned, and what confused me. No polished success stories. Just the ugly process. If you are also exploring systems programming or low level C++, follow along. We can figure this out together. Phase 0 starts now. ⚔️