Frequently Asked Questions about our private, open source protocol

The @platform is a clever abstraction machine. Perhaps the most abstracted component in the entirety of the @platform is its backend service. Very often, we like to say that the @platform is an “automatic backend service” with no more “database management”, but what do these features specifically entail? In today’s episode of “Ask the Founders”, Philippe Cutillas, an @platform developer and one of the winners of our @ppathon II event, had an excellent question for two of our co-founders Kevin Nickels and Colin Constable to answer on this topic.

P: I remember hearing that currently, servers tied to @signs are 4 MB, and I was wondering what the plan for expansion is in the future? I could think of a couple, like just expanding storage as demand grows, having different yearly subscription price tiers for different storage levels, or even selling your own standalone servers that people could have next to their routers or something, but I just wanted to check what your guys’ plan is so we can plan our growth with it too!

K &…

Frequently Asked Questions about our private, open source protocol

When it comes to understanding the @platform and the @sign, our developers are very good at raising questions for parts of our technology that are not so obvious. Although we intended to abstract most of the @platform away for the developers, there are many within our community who are eager to learn much more! “Ask the Founders” is dedicated to questions from our developer community for The @ Company founders to answer. …

A post-cookie-era CRM strategy and marketing mantra

While watching a show on Animal Planet with my kids, I experienced something I haven’t in years of owning a DVR: commercials. We couldn’t fast-forward past them. My kids seemed confused; my husband was outraged. I, on the other hand, hardly gave it a second thought.

As a former founder and professional in the digital media industry, I saw advertising as my bread and butter. But like many expats of the media business, I tired of having to constantly adapt to new ways of making it relevant. At best, advertising doesn’t divert, but…

Frequently Asked Questions about our private, open source protocol

Part of the great thing about working at The @ Company is that we get to chat with the developers trying out the @platform. So naturally, when user “paulvipond” sent a message in our Discord channel about The @ Company, our co-founders were quick to respond. In their follow-up conversation, Paul Armstrong (AKA “paulvipond”), had several insightful questions pertaining to the core infrastructure of the @platform that two of our co-founders, Kevin Nickels and Colin Constable, took much delight in answering. The following Q&A is a portion of that discussion.

P: Why should I trust you and your systems?

K…

By Chris Swan, engineer at The @ Company

Last week I wrote about easier automation using GitHub Actions to build multi-architecture Docker images. That led me to another question — how to create the binaries to go into those builds? If I’m making an Arm image, then I need an Arm binary to go into that image.

At the moment dart compile only compiles self-contained executable files for the architecture it’s being run on. This is a shame, as the underlying tooling is perfectly capable of doing cross-compilation as J-P Nurmi explains in Cross-compiling Dart apps.

Without cross-compilation the only…

9 teams win The @ Company’s second @appathon

Phase 2 of our @appathon II came to a close earlier this April. Seventeen participating teams each developed a pitch and app demo, and our judges selected nine deserving winners.

Track 1 of our @appathon was designated for students and alumni from Zimbabwe, and was sponsored by the Computer Society of Zimbabwe. Track 2, our Global track, included students from the US, Canada, Bermuda, Bangladesh, as well as any country outside of Zimbabwe.

All of these apps are developed on the @platform, a technology that allows for total privacy and gives people…

Written by Barbara Tallent, CEO of The @ Company

“You can’t create a company culture when everyone is virtual.” Really?

I’m paraphrasing but this is from a book I recently read by Martin Lindstrom titled “The Ministry of Common Sense”. I quite enjoyed the book, but he said something like this multiple times throughout the book and it really set me off. I thought, what on earth is he talking about? Maybe he hasn’t read anything from Matt Mullenweg on the matter.

When we first started The @ Company in 2019, we decided we would be virtual. That way we…

Privacy in and of itself is not “fun.” It’s like a bran muffin: good for you, but not particularly exciting.

I once had a friendly debate with a colleague of mine at AWS about what mattered to customers. I headed up marketing for the Startups group and saw, for early-stage startups, our most interesting storyline being the many programs and services we offered that got early-stage prototypes set up quickly and cheaply, and that connected them to funding and growth. My colleague thought I should lead with product features.

He wasn’t wrong. Technical founders do want to know about distinct…