What is Adama?

Beyond an adorable Lamancha goat who was named after William Adama from the amazing Battlestar Galatica show, much of what Adama is from an accidental journey of discovery by building tools to build an online board game. There was no specific goal, and the only semblance of cohesion is from the craftsman sensibilities to polish and reduce. After the fact, the question became "Wait, what even is this thing?"

One idea that emerged was the concept of a Living Document, and the short version is a document that can modify itself based on external signals (i.e. messages) and time.

In the language of games, Adama also represents the Dungeon Master who has the job of telling a story and coordinating players.

A Hacker News comment (which I'm unable to find) from Carl Hewitt indicated that everyone invents the actor model sometime in their career, and Adama is my version of a partial actor model.

Since Microsoft Excel were Lotus 1-2-3 were an influece on how to think with computers (and because reactivity is just so cool), Adama is a reactive compute engine that stores everything in a document. However, instead of infinite grids, Adama embraces tables within documents.

A key problem that reactivity makes simple is privacy where what people see is computed based on them rather than the sender. This allows for next level privacy gurantees should regulations intensify.

As time moved on with using the tool, the idea of single file infrastructure emerged emerged where that single Adama file allowed me to define the backend for a complete product.