The motif of the picture up above is the old saying “the cobbler’s children have no shoes.” In the case of JasperFx Software, we’re a software development consultancy that hasn’t done enough (yet) to automate our own business. Now that development is pretty cheap with our new fangled AI tools, I’m looking to take our existing JasperFx portal application and grow it into a complete CRM tool we can use to basically automate all the annoying paperwork I don’t enjoy doing and generally get the business to be much more organized as we’re growing.
Two decades ago I worked for a software consultancy that I’d argue was one of the best on the planet, but who also had an absolutely dreadful homegrown T&E system someone had hacked together with Lotus Notes. The irony was lost on nobody there.
At the same time, we’ve made a ton of releases lately around “Event Modeling” or “Spec Driven Development” (okay, I’m not sure I buy into that second one and we’re really just building out an optimized Critter Stack way to do BDD that’s hopefully optimal for AI agents). These new capabilities are a bit spread out and we don’t yet have a ton of content showing this new stuff off.
We do have an existing tutorial on Event Modeling with the Critter Stack on the Wolverine documentation site, but I generated it with Opus just to have something that tied everything together on the website and it reads like something obviously generated with AI and not enough human editing yet (the JasperFx AI Skills do this already, but that’s of course optimized for AI agents).
To kill a couple birds with one stone, I’ve started working on a new version of the JasperFx CRM using the Critter Stack that I’m going to mostly build in public and use that effort to dogfood our new Critter Stack capabilities and to build out a new set of tutorials on Event Modeling with the Critter Stack that we expect to eventually land on the JasperFx Software website. So far I’m thinking:
- Describing an Event Model with our fluent interface
- Visualizing an Event Model with Bobcat
- Writing specifications with Bobcat
- Scaffolding new “slices” with our Stoat tool
- Using the new host pooling feature in Alba for efficient testing
- Building reliable tests using the Wolverine TrackedSession & the Bobcat supervisor library
- Using CritterWatch to visualize Event Models on as built code
- How our AI Skills glue it altogether
And from there, I think we could lift lots of small sample usages to demonstrate Wolverine & Marten usage
I’m thinking I’ll try to do the stumbling and fumbling drafts on this blog, then publish the finished product to jasperfx.net with the sample application in CritterStackSamples.
And folks, I’m happy to take requests or feedback!
