Agenda

• Why decentralise software development?
• Experience report with Radicle
• Conclusion

Where do I speak from?

• Senior Dev/Tech Lead/Architect/Consultant/🤡 for 30+ years
• Dedicated eXtreme Programming Practitioner
• In search of autonomy since 1969

Too Long; Didn’t Stay

• Centralised services trade convenience for control (and/or a fee). This is fine …
• … until it’s not
• Decentralised solutions (re-)emerge like Radicle
• It affords teams with both convenience and control over coding process

A bit of terminology

• Decentralisation ≠ Distribution
• Distributed teams have become commonplace in software development
• Decentralised organisations are rather uncommon
• Decentralised coordination is hard

Why centralise development tools?

Convenience

• Offload complexity of tools setup and management on specialists
• Afford better UI & UX
• Ease of integration with other tools/services

Efficiency

• Decrease TCO by mutualising infrastructure costs
• Offload cost of infrastructure management on someone else
• Specialisation ↦ Focus on core domain

Control

• Provide single point of control for organisations
• “Industrialise” practices and tools across organisation and whole sectors

Why decentralise development tools?

Reclaim ownership

• Avoid unfettered value extraction from “megacorps”
• Avoid censorship from governments
• Avoid vendor lock-in

Empower teams & individuals

Remember the Agile manifesto?

Empower teams & individuals

• There’s no One size fits all solutions
• Allow teams to find solutions that fit their context
• Increase local efficiency and avoid bloat

Increase Resilience

• Remove Single Point of Failure
• Distribute load across the “network”
• Adapt to changing environment

Fight against Enshittification

A little bit of context…

• Working on Cardano, a blockchain network and crypto-currency
• Decentralisation is (or should be) at the heart of blockchain
• Yet 100% of the code is hosted on GitHub!

Experiments

• HAL Team has been experimenting with Radicle since May 2025
• We have also been working on providing decentralised access to Antithesis

What is Radicle?

Radicle is an open source, peer-to-peer code collaboration stack built on Git. Unlike centralized code hosting platforms, there is no single entity controlling the network. Repositories are replicated across peers in a decentralized manner, and users are in full control of their data and workflow.

More info at https://radicle.xyz

In a Nutshell

Demo

Working with Radicle

Team’s feedback is overall positive

• Great Developer Experience with CLI
• Smooth collaboration workflow
• Has all the core features one need to collaborate on “small” projects

Some warts and issues:

• Features mismatch between UI and CLI
• Not having a central authority caused some “fumbles”
• Requires deeper knowledge of git
• How to do Trunk-Based Development properly?

More Experiments

Radicle CI

Resources Access Control & Audit

Started collaborating with Antithesis

• Antithesis is a SaaS for Deterministic Simulation Testing
• We wanted to provide this service for the whole Cardano community
• Built a CLI tool to trigger and trace test runs over Cardano blockchain
• More info on Repository

More ideas & projects

• Sharing locally built artifacts
• Decentralised Web-of-Trust for Open-Source Software packages
• Using ATProto for team(s) collaboration
• …

Takeaways

• Decentralised processes & organisations are more resilient
• This is the original promise of the World Wide Web and DVCS like Git
• This promise has been captured by megacorps and governments
• There are tools like Radicle that offer both convenience and control