Mike's Notes
These are my notes from memory on building Pipi 6.
Resources
References
Repository
- Home > Ajabbi Research > Library >
-
Home > Handbook >
Last Updated
15/02/2026
Pipi 6 (2017-2019)
By: Mike Peters
On a Sandy Beach: 03/01/2020
Mike is the inventor and architect of Pipi and the founder of Ajabbi.
In 2014, I read an article in
Scientific American by Markus Covert from Stanford about the successful
computer cellular simulation of Mycoplasma.
In 2015, I realised that Pipi had been a very early form of cloud
computing, and I had been right about many things, and also wrong about others.
When building Pipi 4, I had been regularly told by developers from NZ Crown
Research Institutes.
"It's over-engineered"
I think they were just jealous. Pipi 4 was a better system than what they
had.
In 2016, I decided to rebuild Pipi from memory and convert it into a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that could host a broader range of applications, be more helpful to more people, and financially support itself. But
first, I needed to catch up with how software development had changed.
Changes in Software Development
Strong support for ColdFusion had disappeared, replaced by AJAX; XML was replaced by JSON, and Cloud Computing was the new thing.
Computers were getting cheaper and faster, physical software books were
getting harder to find, JavaScript was everywhere, and the internet was much
quicker.
2017 Start
I was in Invercargill, and there was no one to work with. The NZERN archive
was long gone, but I did find some copies of the NZERN website on the
Internet Archive. Pipi 4 was never documented due to funding constraints, so I carried the design around in my head. However, I
found a copy of the
PIPI 4 Development Plan
and still had the original software reference books.
So, working from 1st principles, I reconstructed the database core of Pipi
without the ecological restoration parts.
-
I added multi-tenancy and 20+ metadata columns to all tables.
-
The previous monolithic architecture was replaced by loosely connected
modules.
-
I figured out how to turn all non-core modules into plugins.
-
I chose domain-driven design (DDD) as the methodology for organising
future applications to run on this platform.
-
I quickly built populated apps in space, health, particle physics,
agriculture, film, construction, laboratory experiments, and wetlands to
prototype and test the system's design for hosting various domains.
-
I decided to continue using ColdFusion (CFML) for the coding.
-
I then reverse-engineered the Covert Lab Mycoplasma cellular simulator to
understand how it worked.
Pipi 6 was built by fusing the rebuilt core platform with Covert Lab's
open-source cellular simulation software. This was challenging and led to an unusual architecture and the use of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), even though I didn't know it was called that at the time.
Every process was given a random probability. And many positive and
negative feedback loops.
It was like composing music (In hindsight, synesthesia helped a lot).
Influences
The internet has changed everything. I could access the ideas and
experiences of Martin Fowler,
Gregor Hohpe,
David C. Hay, Len Silverston, and many more. There were talks on YouTube as well. TDAN
still existed, and a small group of well-organised CFML
developers wrote a lot.
And there now was a thing called DevOps.
Thank you
I'd like to give special thanks to two people in Invercargill: Lesley
Catterall for encouraging me right when I needed it, and Martin Catterall for being a great sounding board about integration. I was very lucky to meet those two.
2019 Finish
It was all going to work. It was rough and took 3 years to finish. By the
end of 2019,
it was time to refactor.
