Career: BRKZ Corp and Red Nova Labs

Nov 2006 – Feb 2011 · age 24–29

What it was

Two cofounded startups, read through the side projects of the same months, since no company code was kept. At BRKZ Corp, November 2006 to March 2008, Jeff's title was "WebOS Inventor": compile a typed description of an application into a whole PHP and JavaScript web app, a desktop in the browser on one heartbeat. At Red Nova Labs, January 2008 to February 2011, the title was "Chief Hacker Emeritus", and by Jeff's own account first CTO for StorageFront.com, a self-storage directory launched in 2009. What survives from that first summer is Kira, a typed language that compiled to PHP 5 and MySQL. Then the personal record goes silent for five years.

Wins, for the age

• At twenty-five, Jeff was building application specs that refused to compile on a dependency cycle, three years ahead of Knockout in 2010 and the React and Svelte that followed.
• Wired compiled applications together through typed packet in and packet out ports in 2008, four years ahead of the Elm architecture and Redux in 2012.
• In Red Nova's first summer, wrote a language whose closures became generated PHP classes and whose api keyword emitted the RPC dispatcher and client stub, a year before PHP 5.3 closures and Swagger in 2009. Its schema declared shard routing, two years before Vitess.
• A style language that recomposed bitmaps into sprites, concurrent with Compass sprite generation in 2009. All on one laptop, by an ape cofounding two companies at once.

What it taught

• A framework is not a product. "Working framework, no product" fits the first company as well as the side project.
• Compiling to a worse language is a series of small essays on what the target lacks.
• Titles drift and artefacts do not. The titles are the least reliable part of the record.
• A real job eats the personal record. The silence from 2008 to 2013 is its cost, and its evidence.

Genealogy

Ancestors: Jovian Katana V1: a forms document compiled into a whole web app. HUROX: the product built with it, a desktop in the browser. Descendants: Jove 3: the WebOS rewritten as a typed state-model language. Kira Project: the language written in Red Nova's first summer. Farm Cron: a schema that generates the query engine. Adama Saas: a control plane generated from an API description.

Epitaph

Here lies a WebOS for one company and a language for the next, sealed away while Jeff went quiet for five years and the companies kept the code.