Hello, Vino

An application platform honed by attackers

A handful of people agree that software’s a bit difficult.

The crux: waste

In any given application, what percentage of code do you wager is unique business logic vs boilerplate, integration, tests, or otherwise? 50%? 25%? As low as 5%? All that overhead produces no differentiable value yet costs real money and increases the surface area for friction and security vulnerabilities. That’s just the code, it doesn’t even account for configuration. Add YAML and the wheat vs chaff ratio drops like a rock.

How Vino works

Vino standardizes logic into black box containers of WebAssembly that communicate over ports. Not network ports, code ports. Think of them like named streams that represent any possible parameter or return value. It doesn’t matter if a component is asynchronous or synchronous, if the data is finite or infinite, partial or whole. It all transports the same way. Output ports connect to like input ports on any other component. You then build up functionality into pipelines (“schematics” in Vino lingo) with data flowing from one end to the other.

How attackers helped build Vino

Our frustrations aren’t new. This excellent presentation from Bret Victor describes these concepts dating back decades.

Bret Victor, The Future of Programming

Where we are now

We’ve knocked over every technical hurdle that we identified as a deal breaker. We are now opening up to talk to companies who want to outsource development that we’ll build on Vino. We want to partner with companies that fit our direction while we iron out the experience. If that’s you, send me an email!

Special thanks

The WasmCloud and waPC teams have been instrumental in helping us get to a reality. When we started building a distributed, WebAssembly-based platform, there wasn’t much precedent to look to. We were glad to commit to WasmCloud (then name wascc) early when we saw their roadmap overlapped with our own plans. The engineering lead, Kevin Hoffman, has been on the bleeding edge of scaling applications and microservices for years and is someone you should follow too!

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I write about JavaScript, Reverse Engineering, Security, and Credential Stuffing. Also a speaker, O'Reilly Author, creator of Plato, Director at Shape Security.

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Jarrod Overson

I write about JavaScript, Reverse Engineering, Security, and Credential Stuffing. Also a speaker, O'Reilly Author, creator of Plato, Director at Shape Security.