On a Sandy Beach: Everything to Gain from Thriving Southland

Mike's Notes

My notes from an all-day workshop organised for farmers, which I attended yesterday.

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08/05/2026

Everything to Gain from Thriving Southland

By: Mike Peters

On a Sandy Beach: 07/05/2026

Mike is the inventor and architect of Pipi and the founder of Ajabbi.

I attended the all-day workshop "Everything to Gain" on 6 May 2026, held at the Ascot Park Hotel in Invercargill, New Zealand. Organised by Thriving Southland.

It was a day full of informative speakers on the global agricultural market, attended mainly by working farmers.

I learned a great deal from the objective data presented and from chatting with the farmers at our table. Hard times are ahead.

Thinking visually while listening

I mentally ran the Workspaces for Agriculture, testing the model assumptions against what I learned.

I also did a brain dump by creating 12 A4 drawings and solving the problem with variables in the current Pipi Core buildout.

Lessons I learned

Shifting a working Pipi 9 from a laptop to a data centre led to several unexpected consequences.

I underestimated the impact of

The naming, generation, and pub/sub of variables.
Host environment.

OS
Java
CFML Engine

Needing to turn Pipi into 4 separate role-based editions, which then exposed some hidden problems.
Adding a nest structure between Pipi and the host environment.
The impact of all of the above when each engine can pub/sub and be both deterministic and probabilistic, with multiple copies of each engine, and many in different locations.
Path length constraint in Windows vs Linux.

This very hard problem can only be solved by running a simulation of all 18 engines in parallel and watching the interaction. Lots of feedback loops.

Yesterday, a lot of progress was made visually, answering these questions. The variable-naming convention used for 12 months has held up, despite some earlier false flags.

More work is needed on variable distribution rules (messaging) for automation.

Global
Local
etc

Today I did another 8 drawings. They were of the Messaging Engine (msg) routing variables between the engines in both deterministic and probabilistic modes.