Event-Hidden Architectures​

How did we get here?​

One of the most powerful and consistent trends in software for the past decade has been the move from single stack to cloud native applications. Cloud native applications are inherently distributed and have become popular as developers are drawn to the convenience of containers and platform-as-a-service infrastructure.

The API-ification of important subsystems means today hardly anyone would consider implementing their own payments, shipping, SMS, chat, billing or shopping cart functionality. Instead they’ll lean on Stripe, Twilio, Shopify, Shippo, etc; accelerating time-to-value and further distributing the functions of the application.

In the last few years developers have moved quickly to incorporate more and diverse AI features into their applications, but AI models and application logic compute requirements are quite different from one another and therefore seldom run in the same stack, further distributing the application.

The Skip framework is a system for building and running incremental backend services, simplifying the challenges of engineering complex reactive systems.

While Skip reactive services compose naturally with each other, they must also coexist with other backend systems with non-reactive semantics and APIs.

This blog post describes some recent enhancements we've made to the Skip framework to make it easy to bridge the reactive/non-reactive interface for popular systems like PostgreSQL and Kafka, and shows how you can build similar integrations with other systems and APIs.

The News

We’re pleased to announce that SkipLabs has raised $8 million to bring incremental computing to applications everywhere. We intend to use the entirety of this funding to enhance the open source Skip project and grow the developer community.

This financing also means we get to work with Lenny Pruss at Amplify Partners who have invested in some of today’s most prominent developer platforms such as dbt Labs, Prisma and Temporal to name a few and Alex Mackenzie at Tapestry VC. Check out Amplify’s blog post that shares their view on SkipLabs and the future of reactive systems and Tapestry’s blog post on why they chose to invest.

We are also humbled to earn the support of individual investors like Adam Gross, Spencer Kimball, Yann LeCun, Tom Occhino, Olivier Pomel and Nicolas Vasilache.

Skip After Meta

Facebook allowed us to open source both Hack and Skiplang so we could share both with the larger engineering community. I eventually decided to leave Facebook (now Meta) to build on the work of Hack and Skiplang and develop technologies that would address the same challenges we had at Facebook but for engineers generally. To do this, SkipLabs needed to incorporate two new technologies to make the work we did at Facebook usable in a normal engineering context.

Coping with success

I joined a much-smaller-than-today’s Facebook in 2011 to work on what would eventually become the developer tools team. At the time I joined, the engineering team was in the hundreds and the tools we had for development were, well, not great. PHP was the backbone of almost everything, with millions of lines of code. JavaScript was secondary, and only a few critical services ran on other languages. The company was scaling rapidly, and our development practices weren’t keeping up.

As the codebase grew, so did the difficulty of maintaining and improving it. Facebook became much more feature rich and simple enhancements became complicated and error prone. Often new features needed to operate conditionally on how other preexisting features were already operating. Essentially with each new layer of features teams added, state management became a greater concern.

We’re pleased to share the alpha release of the Skip Framework, an open source (MIT license) system for building and running reactive backend services.

Skip gives Typescript developers a simple declarative way to implement and run read-mostly features and services that are performant, transparent and continuously updated. The framework handles all the complexities of state management, integrations and failure handling in the process.