Towards a serverless Actor Model
By Jeffrey M. Barber
As I was building the IDE with RxHTML, I ran into a problem that I’ve been thinking about for a while: escaping the silo with service calls. Suddenly, a nice-to-have or neat-to-think-about feature became a priority zero. The motivation came from attempting to keep RxHTML minimal without adding too many new components or javascript-code. For example, just creating a space and document at the same time is problematic.
The less I want RxHTML and the front-end to do, the more I need Adama to pick up the slack. Unfortunately, Adama documents are isolated from the rest of the world and even other documents.
Woe betide anyone that uses MQTT (at scale)
By Jeffrey M. Barber
As I wander, I’m drafting new marketing around the real-time aspects of this platform. This approach is more relatable and easier to explain, but I feel it comes with expectations around integration. One integration would be slapping an MQTT front-end to adapt MQTT clients to the platform. The benefits would be to simplify integrations as there are many people familiar with MQTT and have it within their stack already. The drawback is that I spent multiple years strangling MQTT at Meta where I (regrettably) patented a new protocol.
The path of Monastic Code Machine
By Jeffrey M. Barber
Ever since I was in sixth grade, I’ve been drawn to the machine like a moth to the flame. Last year, I turned 40 and am trying to stay retired from big tech. There are things that I miss like helping engineers blow past their limits, and there is the intoxication of massive scale. There are plenty things that I don’t miss which is why I recently completed six rounds of ketamine infusions which has been a fantastic introduction of psychedelics.
Making HTML the best that it can be
By Jeffrey M. Barber
Over the years, I’ve thought much about UIs from a low level, and for whatever mysterious reason I love building my own scene graphs, engines, frameworks, and what-not. In retrospect, this is an immature approach to a common problem which is the suck of development. Specifically, web development sucks tremendously for so many reasons. Worse yet, as we answer the siren call to make it better, we build a messy brittle unstable empire. We can take a look at the mess that is the current JavaScript front-end engineering body of work, and you don’t have to search far for frustration with npm, dependencies, poor quality, supply chain attacks, broken shit, abandonware, etc, etc, and etc. Generating complaints is like shooting fish in a barrel with a bazooka.
Infrastructure as User Generated Content
By Jeffrey M. Barber
A completely valid criticism of this project could be: Adama is an over-engineered bespoke piece of infrastructure in search of a problem. Fair. I had a great conversation a few weeks ago, and one of the things that occurred to me is that I’m sitting on a super power. Namely, I solved a problem of turning infrastructure into user-generated content. Allow me to ramble, dig into this, and expand.
Thoughts on Capacity Management (and more)
By Jeffrey M. Barber
This is an open design document and stream of consciousness flow session. As I’m trying to focus on getting to a minimally scalable version that is exceptionally low latency, I’ve running with my new storage engine called caravan which I’m optimistic about. I’m working on getting it deployed to production, and I’ll have introduced a single point of failure. Obviously, this has problems, but it’s also a common problem for many environments running a database.