In 1991 a video game called Lemmings was released and by the time I started Elementary School, I was playing Lemmings. Fast-forward to 2026, after Barron's Magazine and Trakify and you have a legitimate need for both the waiting room of room and the lemmings themselves. So what is Lemmings?
Introducing Lemmings
Lemmings is a free and open source product that I created after dusting off a notebook from the past that outlined what I thought of when I intersected Software Engineering and the idea of the little critter named Lemming - and what he was doing in his life. When I launched Trakify in 2014, I built clustering and load balancing into my application, but I truly didn't know what I was capable of running - in an authentic trust worthy manner. How do I know that what I am hitting is actually accurate? I felt like tools like ab simply didn't cut it for what I needed then. After Mike Hogan's piece, I had a massive surge of traffic on the site that resulted in servers being spawned left and right - sooner than later - I realized that I had misconfigured the auto-scaler and needed to take a step back.
I can only learn from the mistakes of the past and not every company created was going to succeed. Even Trakify had its day and that day came and went, but what didn't leave after Trakify was gone was what I learned from its launch. Essentially, lemmings was the tool I wish I had then, that would have better prepared me for those big publicity moments of my business. When I realized that I needed more collaboration with stronger engineers, I went back into the work force and continued to improve my skills.
Now, in the rise of AI powered everything - what can I do as a software guy - that is going to improve anything anywhere? Well, that brings me to the why of lemmings. To me, I spent a handful of hours over the course of a week taking written notes about my lemmings idea from decades ago and I put it to action in a series of prompts. I leveraged the summarize package in order to deal with cool-down periods between development windows. By the time that I got to v0.0.1, I'll have a 432 test passing piece of code calling lemmings that will let me do what I needed to do when I built Trakify and got recognized by Mr Hogan at Barron's Magazine.
What Lemmings Does
What a lemming is is a creature that doesn't have much free will or determination in life. It's a fella that gets its marching orders from the video game player's keys telling it to jump or go left or go right. In reality, my lemmings package is similar, in that when performing load testing of any real world application, you'll need NPCs - Non Player Characters - that can do a task, and that's it. Lemmings, load balances your endpoint by breaking concurrency into -terrain and -pack such that each geographic locality in real life that a lemming or NPC or user have, represents 1 terrain. The number of lemmings is the -pack size.
In 2020 when I built the PhoenixVault that made the NARA released JFK files searchable for the first time since their release in a complete manner - I had a feature called StumbleInto where I took the concept from lemmings and applied it to the PhoenixVault. Readers, or NPCs or lemmings, didn't know what they were getting into or where they were going, when they would hit the files and start sleuthing around; but what they did do is keep a log of what pages they saw. Well, that concept was carried forward into lemmings.
When Lemmings Win
Lemmings could have better prepared me for Trakify's launch in 2015. With AI, I was able to bring to life something from the archive's of Andrei's engineering notebooks that solves a real world problem for real world companies. The software is free. If you find use or value in it, support it by spreading the word about it, using it in future projects, and keeping the community up to date with relevant information.
Where I win in building and releasing lemmings free and open source is in continuing my life's passion of writing excellent software and serving those who serve others by means of the gifts given to me through decades of hard work by my own two hands. I carry the torch forward and hand forth my legacy in my code by making it open source. If you find value in my work, hire me for my consulting services and I'll apply and use lemmings for your organization to ensure that you don't run into the same challenges that I did in 2015 that lemmings was designed to remediate through proper knowledge disclosures and testing of key infrastructure.
Where Lemmings Will Go
Since I am dusting off old engineering notebooks and compiling complex Markdown files that are draft specifications and instructions for AI systems, the lemmings offering was built over a 72 hour window. When I asked ChatGPT to come up with a project plan for the notebook that I created, it quoted me 4-6 weeks to completion. Nope. Not even 4 days bro. Adding to lemmings is possible, and my notebook for the idea expanded after I built it. Once I had it in hand, I wanted this and that and therefore, I began writing once again. Where will lemmings go?