Enter Perichron

3-ish years ago, Astra got a ‘World Domination Plan’. Fictitious name, but we realized that what our tiny visions were needed a path to success.

We had this very large idea of “we want to work in a lot of places and do a lot of things”, but the actual action items that we needed to get there weren’t clear.

In the WDP, we outlined key phases for Astra, as well as the main technical infrastructure we would need to get there. I mentioned in our Gen 2.0 essay that we had a real need to invest in the technical infrastructure of our front-end codebases as opposed to scaling what we knew we couldn’t sustain, even if it meant years working on stuff that people wouldn’t see or understand the scale of.

Now, in the WDP, we set out 3 main phases. You can read our World Domination Plan we came up with in 2019 here.

Foundational: figuring out who we are and what our magic is

Architectural (where we are now): building as much software as we can and reaching different areas & issues

Unification: Unifying all that software together so that it can work off of one another and create solutions out of Core Tools that we haven’t see before.

Finishing Aureus was our first step into the Architectural phase (which is the next 5 years of what we’re doing). Next, we need to figure out ‘how do we actually connect the software together?’.

I don’t know that answer, but we’ll figure it out. Today, we made Perichron, Astra’s org-wide storage layer public. This is the first step of getting to that unification phase. By re-using our storage layer, we’re setting the stage to implement Perichron and unite Astra’s resources.

In my head, I want our back-end functionality across Astra’s apps to be linked to one user’s many resources and devices, partially similar to iCloud. I believe that Astra will work best not only when we have solid, individual applications, but also connected pathways for those applications to enhance each other’s functionality.

I don’t know what this looks like. I don’t know anything about back-ends or where to start. But I’m so excited to find out, and I can’t wait to share what we’ll learn.

As always, ad astra per aspera. Stay safe, someone loves you.

Amanda :-)