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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 Extensions – VS Code and IntelliJ support
  • Synapify – Professional modeling workbench with visual editing, simulation, and code generation

Commercial

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.

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