Tensegrity

So I thought I’d try out this Ghost WordPress thing, given that Substack seems to be platforming some rather unsavory folk. I mean, this platform may well end up doing the same, mind, but for the mean time seems to be blissfully free of such. Anyways, I used to have a technical blog of the same name – Tensegrity – quite some time ago and I really needed a long form medium as Twitter certainly blows big wet chunks and – well – I’m not really having much love for Mastodon nor Bluesky. So we’ll see.

For the most part I want to document and post about my long term “side” project Apollo. Apollo is kind of a weird amalgamation of all the various distributed technologies I’ve been working with and researching over the last 3 decades or so. While Apollo is quite interesting in and of itself, it’s really a platform library rather than an application. Which is no surprise because that’s how I build things and have for decades, but still. One needs applications and frankly, what I really love to do is use this stuff for far more valuable things, rather than simply a toolbox of interesting stuff. So that’s why I started my “demo” project, built from the Apollo modules, the aptly named A-Demo. So I’ll start out writing about demo, what I’m aiming for, and what “done” looks like for that.

I also have another mega project (I’m an idiot) that involves my event driven simulation framework: Prime Mover. I recently had a bout of activity on that project, given the new Virtual Threading in Java 21. This made it possible for me to rewrite my horrifically complicated and brittle continuation transform into a far, far simpler and JVM supported continuation transform.

The Prime Mover framework allows one to seamlessly transform Java code into an event driven simulation. It does this by allowing the developer to declare simulation entities as instances of Java classes, and transform their methods into events that are scheduled, rather than called immediately. Frankly, I think it’s pretty damn cool (of course) and it is something I want to play with much more, but…

So we’ll see. I’m kind of a crazy person anyway, and who knows where I’ll end up as it’s my hobby and who cares about all this anyway? lol. I’ll work on getting my Substack content ported over to here so I don’t lose all that.

Next post I’ll lay out the Apollo demo I’m working on and we’ll see where things go from there.