Infrastructure for the Metaverse
By Jeffrey M. Barber
I’ve worked at Meta, and I’ve thought a great deal about the metaverse. The core question that I’ve been asked by people as I pitch my platform is of two forms. First, there is how on earth did Zuckerberg spend that much money. Second, what on earth is Zuckerberg thinking? I generally give a pithy answer to the first question, but the second question has a simple answer. It’s his company, and he believes in the metaverse.
Critical mass and venture capital.
By Jeffrey M. Barber
I’ve had a few conversations with venture capital without myself soliciting them (this sales process made me feel pretty), but I’m not keen on giving up control nor having a boss at the moment. Freedom, as a company value, requires vigilance. However, it did get me thinking about the next step. What happens after I stop wandering. Do I get serious? Or should I continue wandering? For how long?
JavaScript ecosystem is garbage
By Jeffrey M. Barber
The entire JavaScript ecosystem is garbage, and I fear it is a pox on the web industry. This may seem ironic since I’ve built a JavaScript ecosystem which was a key part of I got my big tech senior principal promotion. Here is the deal: I chose JavaScript out of spite because I knew it would be successful and let me rake in those fat-checks. Paradoxically, JavaScript is better than C++ for building product infrastructure due to Greenspun’s tenth rule, and the language is suitable for many tasks. It’s a glue language, and it’s OK. The fragmented ecosystem…
Scaling to the moon
By Jeffrey M. Barber
Here I am with two servers and a service in early access, and I’m thinking about massive scale. And, by massive scale, I mean the entire planet filled will billions of devices. This kind of scale is the one thing that I’ll probably never achieve again since leaving Meta where I was the architect of how Meta does real-time. Have you read my former team’s SOSP 21 paper on BladeRunner? It’s a fun read. Regardless, I was wondering if Adama could achieve massive scale, so let’s think loudly.
Cleaning up a multi-region mess
By Jeffrey M. Barber
I’ve started to make a mess of things. Fortunately, it is recoverable, so come along as I untangle my multi-region mess. If I haven’t mentioned it here, then the internal plan is to have Adama run on the edge close to people. Ideally, I want a heterogeneous fleet of clusters spread across the globe running on different vendors. I’m evaluating using PlanetScale for the control plane, and it’s looking like the control plane will be located in the US where I may shard at a tenant level. I’m still thinking about the database, but the open question at hand is how to build the multi-region data plane. As a design detail, documents are stored with Amazon S3 and then rehydrated into one region with periodic snapshots, so keep that in mind. In particular, documents will live on a single host which I’ll write about more at a later time.
One does not simply call a function
By Jeffrey M. Barber
July was exceptionally productive on many fronts. The IDE is coming along, and I’m shooting for a second early access launch with the web portal. RxHTML is shaping up, and the tension between the purity of doing everything with RxHTML and needing a few escape hatches here and there has been illuminating.
Adama now offers basic website hosting, limited CDN functionality, secret management, collaborative text editing with operational transforms, and has the foundations for calling other services. As I’m exploring how to have Adama talk to itself to become a full actor model, trust has become a central issue.