The Research
A developing architectural argument.
Puppeteer is supported by a series of papers exploring the relationship between operations, values, causality, replay, participants and infrastructure. The series documents both the ideas behind the system and the questions that remain open.
The Puppeteer Papers Series · by Álvaro Rivera, NCubo Ideas · published on Zenodo
- 01Anti-Porous Architecture: A Unified Design Principle for CQRS + Actor + Event-Sourcing SystemsThe foundational principle: operation-centric encoding removes a representational defect shared across databases, DDD, REST and event sourcing.FOUNDATIONSARCHITECTURE
- 02Program–Value Separability: The Structural Precondition for Compilation, Caching and Dense Journaling in a DSL RuntimeSeparating a program from its values makes it a durable, replayable unit of state — the precondition for compilation, caching and dense journaling.PROGRAMVALUE
- 03Reactions and the Partition: Opt-In Eventual Consistency in Actor-Native SystemsSplitting an event into an immediate branch and a deferred branch — now and later consequences — makes eventual consistency opt-in.CAUSALITYCONSISTENCY
- 04Preserving Semantic Continuity Across Actors: A Tell-Based Approach Without OrchestrationRecording cross-actor messages as program operations preserves continuity edge by edge, without orchestration.PARTICIPANTSCONTINUITY
- 05Most Infrastructure Layers Are Symptoms of the Persistence ModelA diagnostic typology for the stack layers that exist only to compensate for the underlying persistence model.PERSISTENCEINFRASTRUCTURE
- 06The Journal as Substrate: Unifying Deployment, Replication, Backup and Offline Operation in Distributed SystemsDeployment, replication, backup and offline operation all reduce to replay against a single journal substrate.REPLAYSUBSTRATE
- 07After the Substrate: Building Software Without a DatacenterA journaled-program substrate makes the datacenter no longer a structural requirement of running production software.INFRASTRUCTUREDEPLOYMENT
- 08Inference without Authority: The Three Authorities That Govern an OutputSeparating the three authorities over an output — the domain, the actor and the assembler — removes assertions made beyond their warrant, so observers receive testimony instead of inference.AUTHORITYOUTPUT
- 09Identity Precedes Staging: One Play, Many StagesDraftA domain is not its deployment. A staging — where it runs, how it is hosted, which client observes it — is built against the domain, while the domain references none of them.Draft 0.1 · Sections 1–9 complete · Conclusion and appendices pendingIDENTITYSTAGING
- In progressThe series is still being written — further papers are underway.
Reading the argument so far.
The series is designed to be read in order — each paper builds on the operations, values and causality established before it — and it continues to grow.
Start a Technical Conversation