📄️ Start here
Do you want to avoid unnecessary reading? Take a moment to decide which statement describes your curiosity best:
📄️ Interested visitor
Some ideas are worth slowing down for. Here is one this page paints a plain-language picture of what Ampersand is, what sets it apart, and what it is not — enough to decide, in a few minutes, whether it deserves more of your time.
📄️ Student
There is a particular satisfaction in watching something you described come to life and run. You can have that very kick here: sketch a small world — who may enrol in which course, say — click through a working application within the hour, and then deepen your understanding one idea at a time. What follows is a short, ordered path — tutorial first, then the ideas beneath it, then practice. So, you can see the whole route before you take a single step and judge whether it suits the way you like to learn.
📄️ Ampersand User
Imagine your information model gives you a running system right away. You only specify the rules of your business and the user interfaces. By generating a prototype from it, prove to the world that your specification is sound. Simply because it works. "Show, don't tell" was never closer. No longer will you make designs for archives only. That is what this page invites you to build on. The journey below sets out that path in stages — from a first model to a deployed, maintainable application — and names what each stage asks of you, so you can weigh, before you begin, whether this way of building befits you.
📄️ Scientist
Behind Ampersand sits a claim worth examining below, you will find the theoretical foundation, the publications and the concrete results, all out in the open — enough to judge for yourself whether this is ground worth building on.
📄️ Contributor
If you want to help develop Ampersand further, there is genuinely satisfying work here — a compiler, a framework, and the documentation around them, all in the open source space. Below you will find how we organise the project, where your kind of work lives, and exactly what a first contribution involves — branch, change, release note, review — so you can see clearly what you would be stepping into, and decide, on your own terms, whether to take a seat.