Something is Coming

If you’ve been paying attention … you’ve noticed I’ve been mysteriously quiet for a bit. This wasn’t accidental. Not at all.

The truth is, I’ve been working on something for nearly 6 years now. Every few months, I would hit a wall and then get stuck for months on end. During these slow periods is when I was most active in the communities I participate in.

But then, about 8 months ago, breakthrough after breakthrough kept coming. It never stopped. My cofounder has given up trying to keep track, because every week I message him: “dude, you won’t believe what I just discovered!” Sometimes … it’s multiple times a weekend.

I’m not ready to share the details, but I can tell you what it isn’t, because that’s easier.

It isn’t a framework. It isn’t a SaaS dashboard. It isn’t a wrapper around someone else’s technology. It isn’t something an LLM can even help you with.

It’s something that has sucked up much of my adult life’s free time. A problem that required me to throw away entire approaches, several times. Something that required going back to the 1970’s and realize the entire industry chose the ' wrong’ path.

Yeah, that probably sounds grandiose as fuck. I know because my wife tells me it doesn’t make sense and insane in the same sentence. For six years. Hell, every few months when I hit a dead end, I would convince myself it was wrong and impossible. That someone else had surely tried this before.

And then another breakthrough would happen.

But now… Now I’m sure.

We’ve been building distributed systems wrong for nearly 50 years. Not slightly wrong, architecturally wrong. We’ve been fighting a constraint that we should have been working with: physics.

But interestingly, as usual, it’s my experiences that culminated in me even believing this is possible in the first place:

• repeatedly working with event-oriented data at a scale most people can’t imagine.
• building a physical simulation of our universe for a game that never launched.
• and most importantly, having the desire to send a letter to my son, long after I am gone.

Without these experiences… I’d have never even tried.

Anyway. I’ll have more to share in the coming weeks. There’s a paper, code, and blog series explaining absolutely everything in intricate detail — because I think the ideas matter as much as the implementation.

For now, I just want to say: I’m still here and I’m coming back with something epic.