Demos and systems

Working software. Inspectable architecture.

A complete system, bounded experiments and work in progress: each one turns an architectural claim into behavior that can be watched, run and inspected.

Building now

We're in the middle of this work. Come and see how it's going.

BUILD JOURNAL

The Shot

A crowd game for an arena, written while we build it — thousands of phones, two teams, roles that change between turns, and three fronts built at once: the phone, the big screen and the console. Not playable yet; the storage under it has already carried ten thousand simulated phones.

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BUILD JOURNAL

OVERTAKE

A racing game for a crowd: every section a team, every phone a controller. The whole race plays on a phone today; the crowd around you is still simulated.

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Systems

Complete software that runs end to end, built on the same substrate the experiments test. Not an exercise: the whole thing.

RUNNING SYSTEM

The Village Hall

A bingo night running on the phones in the room — no server, no database, one journal per handset.

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Experiments

Small, bounded exercises. Each one tests a single architectural idea, behavior or assumption, and says what it does not establish.

COORDINATION SERIESVideo

The Stage Manager

One character standing on several machines, and two characters speaking — the only two mechanisms there are.

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EXECUTABLE COMPARISONVideo

The Same Invoice, Twice

The same business outcome implemented around two different architectural centers.

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DEPLOYMENT DEMOVideo

One Play, Many Stages

One domain held fixed while its deployment and its clients change — and the diff that proves it, which you can run.

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JOURNAL DEMO

Forgetting on Purpose

Removing part of an executable journal, with proof that nothing a reader can ask of the present changes — and the one question about the past that does.

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DEPLOYMENT DEMOVideo

Three Machines, One Paper

Whether a datacenter is a structural requirement of running production software, or a requirement of the stack it is conventionally built on.

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DEFERRED WORK DEMO

The Line You Draw

Why systems grow a queue, a worker and a retry table — and what happens when the deferral is a line the developer draws instead.

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CRASH DEMO

Unacknowledged

A process killed between deciding to send a message and sending it — and what its own record says afterwards about a message whose fate nobody knows.

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OUTPUT DEMO

Nobody Asked the Domain

Who decides where a computed value ends up — and whether the code that computed it is ever in a position to be asked.

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In Motion

Active

The robot is not the product. The distributed system is.

For demonstrations involving movement, robots, devices, physical environments or systems operating in more dynamic, embodied scenarios.

Distributed Systems in Motion: the research frontier

CONTINUITY DEMOVideo

The Robot Forgets. The Puppet Doesn't.

Two robots in a simulator, each keeping a journal of its own — and what is still there once the process that drove one of them is gone.

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DISCOVERY DEMOVideo

The Map Was Given. The Obstacles Were Not.

Robots in a warehouse that has physics — and where their knowledge of what blocks them comes from, given that nobody wrote it down for them.

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INPUT DEMO

Maze Chase — Live Human Control Meets Robot Autonomy

A person steering one robot of a fleet live while the others take the same game and work out their own parts — and what a keystroke is once it reaches a subject that has a body.

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