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About Ossum Inc.

Ossum Inc. builds tools that make designing distributed systems accessible to domain experts—not just seasoned architects.

Our Mission

Complex software systems are hard to build. The gap between what business experts understand and what developers implement is where projects fail. Requirements get lost in translation, designs drift from intent, and systems end up solving yesterday's problems.

We believe there's a better way.

RIDDL (Reactive Interface to Domain Definition Language) bridges this gap by providing a specification language that domain experts can read and contribute to, while being precise enough for AI-assisted code generation. It's Domain-Driven Design made practical.

The Story

RIDDL began in 2019, born from decades of experience building large-scale distributed systems. After watching project after project struggle with the same problems—miscommunication between business and technical teams, designs that couldn't keep up with changing requirements, implementations that drifted from specifications—founder Reid Spencer started asking: What if the specification itself was the source of truth?

The first commits landed in late 2021. Reactific Software LLC, the original home of RIDDL, was acquired by Ossum Inc. in 2022 to continue the vision: making distributed system design accessible to everyone who understands the domain, not just those who can write code.

What We Build

Open Source

  • RIDDL – The specification language and compiler
  • IDE Helpers – VS Code and IntelliJ support

Commercial

  • riddlg – The generator: documentation, API specifications, schemas, catalogs and code from a validated model, with AI assistant integration over MCP
  • Synapify – Professional modeling workbench with visual editing, simulation, and code generation

The Team

RIDDL exists because of the contributions of many, but it was initiated by:

Reid Spencer - Founder & Chief Architect
Deeply experienced system architect, software developer, and entrepreneur. Initiated RIDDL in 2019 and founded Ossum Inc. to bring it to market. LinkedIn

See Who Made RIDDL Possible for the full list of contributors and the foundational work RIDDL builds upon.

Contact

Search all documentation

There are two search fields, and they cover different things.

Field Searches
The box in the title bar only the site and version you are reading
Full Search, just below it every product at once

The reason for two is that the documentation is published as several independent sites — one per product, each with its own versions — and each site builds its own search index. That per-site index is what makes the title-bar box precise: on the RIDDL 1.31 pages it returns 1.31 answers, not answers from a release you are not reading.

Full Search is built separately, over the published pages of every product, so it can find things the title-bar box cannot — searching for "Synapify" from inside the RIDDL documentation, for instance.

It covers the current release of each product, plus the pages on this site. Older releases are deliberately left out: each product publishes several versions and every alias is a full copy, so including them would return the same page three or four times. To search within an older release, open it and use the title-bar box.

Both fields are at the top of every page: the title-bar box on the first row, Full Search on the band directly beneath it.