Towards the end of 2019 I started developing Sigbla. And just now, around half way through 2024, I released the first beta version. It’s a Source Available type of software, different from Open Source, but still developed in the open. But it wasn’t until towards the end of 2023 I even put it up on GitHub. In other words, a very slow process. And all just to be able to put some numbers in a table!? ...
Rarely do you find technology with so much hype as blockchain, where the best architectural advice is to avoid using it. Or, said with less hyperbole, to correctly minimize your direct dependency on blockchain. Why is that? Imagine software where thousands of processes all need to look at and verify the same state change. And imagine too that they all need to store a copy of the same information to ensure the state change is correct. ...
Since late 2011 I’ve been working on distributed computing platforms, where software that runs across more than one machine is running as what we’d call a cluster. Now, as I focus more on blockchain and DLT, a lot of the approaches to computing are similar. A lightweight version of the challenges with working on distributed systems can be found when working on software that uses multiple threads to do concurrent computing. Things can quickly get very ugly if you do not know how to approach the challenge. ...
In 2010 I wrote a blog post called “Node.js, is this the next big thing?” I came to think about that again this week when I randomly watched Yevgeniy (Jim) Brikman’s video about the Play Framework at LinkedIn. Combine this with the progress of Scala.js and ClojureScript and I think we can conclude that node.js was very much an indicator of direction with simplification, unification and a return to an event driven model. All for good reasons. Look at job postings and you’ll find plenty of companies looking for the full-stack engineer. It’s difficult to be a full-stack engineer, especially a good one, if each tier in the stack is very different. It makes both economical and technical sense to have our tools reach across both server-side and client-side, while still maintaining a healthy separation of concerns with a 3-tier (or N-tier if N >= 3) system. ...