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7 :ID: c9766ba7-319d-49f3-868e-8e289dbf5b3b 11 I've worked in and around software systems for many years. Throughout
12 my journey I've worked with some incredibly capable programmers,
13 leaders, sales professionals, and curious minds from all walks of
14 life. I've been fortunate to witness some highly effective teams on
15 complex projects deliver under impossible constraints. I've also seen
16 the other side - where a team isn't effective for one reason or
17 another, even on simple problems.
19 My work as of late is stemmed from the simple premise that there
20 exists an
/environment/ in which a team can be highly effective. My
21 goal is to find those local optimums in my areas of interest where
22 such an environment can be built and
/great work/ can be done.
24 In my professional experience, it is becoming much more difficult to
25 build an
/environment/ where people can be effective. There are
26 several contributing factors which muddy the waters but it all boils
27 down to capabilities and politics.
29 Your environment must be capable. It must provide everything your team
30 needs now and
/may/ need in the future. If the environment doesn't
31 provide something, you need to provide all building materials for it -
32 /even if you don't know what you're building yet/.
34 To build a capable environment you need to discard politics from your
35 decision-making process. In other words, drop the ego. This requires a
36 high degree of introspection. It's hard enough for individuals, let
37 alone an entire team or company. In the world of software we tend to
38 have two camps - the pro-dev who prefers ergonomic but proprietary
39 tools and the foss-dev who prefers clunky but open-source
40 alternatives. You can't limit your environment based on the camp you
43 * COMMENT The Compiler Company 45 :ID: ae6e6d60-e7c7-4efa-9136-26ad262a55b3 47 Without further ado, I'd like to announce
/The Compiler Company, 48 LLC/. The purpose of
/The Compiler Company/ is to
/compile/ 51 More specifically, I'm writing a software suite which specializes in
52 building environments.
54 The software isn't for everyone - modules will be rewritten
55 frequently, code may be terse in places, with specialized tools,
56 custom compilers, and advanced hardware features. It's for a specific
57 type of programmer - an
/operator/ if you will, who may use it for
58 rapid-development of their own programs (or companies). The barrier to
61 At this stage, I'm interested in
*systems*,
*processes*, and
62 *protocols* - not
*products* and
*services*.
/The Compiler Company/'s
63 most valuable assett its ideas. A
/demo/ system is being written which
64 serves as a reference implementation but this is currently designed
65 for internal benchmarking.
67 ** [[https://compiler.company/docs/core][core]] 69 :ID: f64eb994-2a5e-4f7b-90c4-e6c29e321791 71 The
=core= is a collection of applications and libraries built from
72 the bottom-up with modularity in mind. It's primarily written in
73 Common Lisp and Rust with minimal external dependencies.
75 *Lisp* is a first-class citizen of our internal environment. We
76 currently rely on the Steel Bank Common Lisp compiler but even if we
77 switch to a different implementation there will always be Lisp. It's
78 our dedicated high-level programming language (and much more, as we'll
81 *Rust* is second-class. It meets an arbitrary criteria for what I
82 would consider
/good enough/ but there are many contenders including
83 C, C++, and Zig. It helps fill the gaps in our Lisp environment which
84 would be extremely difficult to implement from scratch like
85 eliminating GC, compile-time type safety, cross-compilation features,
86 and advanced networking protocols. The community support and my
87 personal experience with the language are also contributing
88 factors. The trade-off is that we need to support another language
89 environment in parallel to Lisp.
91 ** [[https://compiler.company/docs/infra][infra]] 93 :ID: 3c6bd04c-1da6-43d0-8d5c-bb267ada3f7a 95 Unfortunately, ideas can't host themselves. We need a robust
96 infrastructure to compensate for this. The project
=infra= contains
97 scripts for building and maintaing the entire corporate
100 We typically host services on Arch Linux. Podman and QEMU are used for
101 virtualization. Modules can be built and deployed separately to make
102 host-migration easier as we expand.
