Adama

Apr 2020 – Apr 2026 · age 38–44

What it was

A reactive document database in which every document is a tiny virtual machine. You wrote the backend once in the Adama language: fields private by default, loops paid for from a budget, a state machine that could wait weeks for a person. The runtime turned every change into a delta with its own inverse, so persistence, replication, undo, replay and billing came from one mechanism. Around it came a storage engine, a gossiping protocol, a web tier, a template compiler, a control plane and, by 2026, agents as transactional types. It began because this primate wanted to play board games with friends who had moved away. It ended with 9,945 tests and a farewell that called it a cathedral.

Wins, for the age

In 2019, in the lamancha incubator, Jeff found the living document, ten months ahead of Cloudflare Durable Objects (2020), and per-viewer privacy that is also efficiency, five years ahead of Electric and Zero (2024).
Differentiable transactional memory arrived concurrently with Immer patches (2018), and the dungeon master, a future awaited on a person, concurrently with Temporal's human-in-the-loop signals (2020).
At thirty-eight, Jeff set out to build a whole stack alone, tested to an unusual degree.
When the world turned to agents, the architecture "came pre-pivoted": durable sessions, mandatory round caps, compiler-checked read-only tools.

What it taught

Take a silly problem completely seriously. Hidden hands and misclicks produced privacy, undo, and the agent model.
Honesty can be an architecture: one error code per call site, gold tests, readiness tiers written down.
An inventor is not an entrepreneur. Billing stayed a stub, and it took five years and a house fire to say so.

Genealogy

Ancestors: Arcane Work: the spreadsheet itch. Jove 3: a reactive dependency graph treated as its own language. Career Facebook: real-time delivery at scale. Lamancha: the search that birthed a board-game language. Lamancha II: the language and runtime, born privately. Descendants: Goat Bot: a one-operator console to deploy it. Hearth: Netty, SMTP, SigV4 and MCP habits in one jar. Opinion Panel: a product built on its agents. Parts: Adama Agents, Adama Caravan, Adama Core, Adama Docs, Adama Language, Adama Net, Adama Platform, Adama Rxhtml, Adama Saas, Adama Tooling, Adama Web.

Epitaph

Here lies Adama, built so an ape with a keyboard could play board games with distant friends. It taught documents to dream and deltas to remember their inverse, and it let a question wait for a person for weeks.