Stax Digital Garden

YMN-1004 - Append-Only Interaction Ledgers

2 min read

Living Document Notice
Published 2026-09-17. The evolving architecture, revisions, and connected notes for this dispatch live in the Stax Digital Garden.

Append-Only Interaction Ledgers

Append-Only Interaction Ledgers: Dual-trace Phosphor P31 emerald green and P4 paper white vector CRT macro showing loopback CardDAV delta synchronization sweeps and ETag validation pulse sequences

Summary

Relationship logs degrade when notes are overwritten or dispersed across random scratchpads. Yeoman implements monotonic, append-only interaction ledgers that capture structured conversation metadata, meeting transclusions, and action items with immutable timestamps.

Event-Sourced Relationship Histories

Traditional address books present a static snapshot of an individual’s current status, discarding the rich historical narrative of how a relationship evolved over months and years. When notes are edited in place, temporal context is destroyed.

Yeoman treats relationship logging as an event-sourced ledger. An interaction is an immutable factual observation: a conversation happened at a specific time, across a specific channel, concerning specific topics, resulting in concrete commitments.

Interaction Timeline:
[2026-01-15: Initial Architecture Review]
       │
       ▼
[2026-04-10: Columnar WAL Serialization Sync]
       │
       ▼
[2026-09-16: Bi-Weekly KPP Loopback Alignment]
       │
       ▼ (Append-Only Head)

Structure of an Interaction Note

Interactions can be logged as standalone notes within yeoman/interactions/ or transcluded directly into the parent contact dossier. Each interaction carries structured event metadata:

---
title: "Interaction: 2026-09-16 KPP Loopback Alignment"
date: 2026-09-16T14:30:00Z
type: interaction
channel: matrix
participants:
  - "urn:yeoman:contact:0191fa30-1001-7000-8000-000000000001"
summary: "Discussed local-first JSON-RPC socket latency and zero-copy buffers."
action_items:
  - "Deliver benchmark numbers for 10,000 triple hops by Friday."
---
 
## Discussion Notes
Detailed observations from the technical synchronization...

Transclusion and Dossier Synthesis

Obsidian and Quartz digital gardens render interaction histories dynamically using block transclusion syntax:

## Recent Interactions
transclude(yeoman/interactions/2026-09-16-sync#summary)
transclude(yeoman/interactions/2026-08-02-sync#summary)

When viewing Ada Lovelace’s dossier, the user sees an integrated timeline synthesized on the fly from independent ledger files, ensuring that the primary contact file remains compact while the interaction history grows indefinitely.

Automated Ledger Insertion Script

Operators can record new interactions via a lightweight command-line utility that updates last_contact_date atomically:

# Log a phone conversation and bump contact cadence
bosun yeoman record \
  --contact "urn:yeoman:contact:0191fa30-1001-7000-8000-000000000001" \
  --channel "phone" \
  --summary "Quarterly roadmap sync and infrastructure alignment"

The CLI tool appends the event to the interaction ledger and updates the contact frontmatter in a single atomic filesystem transaction.

  • Directus Target: yeoman
  • Garden Source Reference: MOC - Bosun PKM Tools, MOC - Fleet Operations
  • Garden Source Reference: [YMN-1004 - Append-Only Interaction Ledgers](YMN-1004 - Append-Only Interaction Ledgers)

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