Agent Elmer
Origin
Twenty years in the making.
- 2003 — a Florida general contractor starts teaching himself computer science, ending up in large-scale distributed data processing and high-frequency trading.
- ~2010–2012 — ProDataLab: "Everything is a component. Everything!" — a fabric where components plug into one another.
- October 2014 — reading about smart contracts, he sees the flaw: one global chain is data-centric. Coordination should belong with the agent — not one ledger for the whole world. He knew they had built it wrong; he did not want to rebuild it.
- 2015 — the vision is written down. It wears the era's blockchain vocabulary because that was the only language in the room — and where the funding was.
- 2018 — hearing about Holochain, he recognises it immediately: the right architecture for crypto and self-sovereignty — agent-centric, not one global chain.
- Now — the vocabulary is gone; the architecture remains: deterministic, agent-centric, provable.
About
A builder who taught himself the machine.
Peter Alexander built things with his hands first — an apprentice carpenter, a foreman framing a house a week, then a Florida State Certified General Contractor running residential, commercial, and subdivision work through the 1990s.
In 2003 he set out to teach himself computer science, and went straight at the hard end: large-scale, fractional time-series data processing and the platforms behind high-frequency trading. A decade at ProDataLab convinced him software was built wrong — needless complexity, fragility, no reuse. "Everything is a component," he wrote. "Everything!"
In October 2014, hearing about smart contracts, he opened the Bitcoin paper and stopped two pages in: the architecture was clever, and data-centric — one global chain, agreed by everyone. He knew it was built wrong. He did not set out to rebuild it.
Then, in 2018, hearing about Holochain, he knew immediately: here was the right architecture for crypto and self-sovereignty — agent-centric, peer-to-peer, with no global singleton. His own work found its place beside it: the deterministic, component-based software substrate that belongs to an agent-centric world.
- Creative Development Systems — founder, Nov 2013 – present · Denver, CO
- ProDataLab — R&D, 2003–2013
- Florida General Contractor — licence CGC-060560, since 1992
- @makeroftools
In his words
Complexity is easy; it's simplicity that's incredibly hard.
That has been the whole work: not adding more, but making a system that can prove what it built — and then getting out of the way.