Adama saas: the control plane

2022 – Apr 2026 · age 40–44

What it was

The part of Adama that knew who owned what. Accounts, authorities, spaces, domains and document locations lived in sixteen MySQL tables. A 2,739-line XML definition generated the server routers, request types, metrics, default policy, Java and JavaScript clients, documentation, REST routes, and even an Adama service so documents could call the platform themselves. Developers held their own private keys and the server stored only public ones. Documents could act as identity authorities. The platform hosted itself: each space had an IDE document that backends watched to know when to redeploy, and each developer had a billing document that priced usage as a reactive program. Rendezvous hashing ran inside a SQL ORDER BY. The single region worked and was tested end to end; the second region was scaffolding that never answered.

Wins, for the age

• At forty, alone, Jeff kept 102 live methods aligned across Java, JavaScript, REST, docs and tests by treating the API as data. One ape and one XML file held the whole surface together.
• Made the platform run on itself. Every deploy exercised the IDE document and every hour exercised billing, a free integration test.
• Put rendezvous hashing into a single SQL query and bound documents to machines with one conditional UPDATE.
• Found on their own what GitHub's SSH keys (2008) and Let's Encrypt's DNS-01 (2015) had found: identity as a client-held key, and domain ownership proved by a DNS TXT record.
• Designed error codes as a keyspace spread by base-four digit distance, so no two are easy to confuse.

What it taught

• Generate the surface and the surface stays consistent.
• Self-hosting is the cheapest integration test there is.
• Stubs compound. Twenty-one regional RPCs that never respond, empty region classes and an empty metering module are each small, and together they are a second product that does not exist.
• A bill needs a payment provider. The billing document priced usage beautifully and the payment plan answered "none, disabled".

Genealogy

Ancestors: Career BRKZ RedNova: two startups, a "WebOS", and early lessons in running a business. Farm Cron: a household system that swelled into a multi-tenant platform. Kira Project: api functions that generated their own dispatcher and JavaScript stub. Descendants: none on record. The generated surface and findbind stop here. Part of: Adama.

Epitaph

It generated its own API from one file, hosted its own IDE and its own bill as documents on itself, and bound a document to a machine in one UPDATE. Its second region was twenty-one questions it never answered.