Playing for Complications—and Why Systems Shouldn't
In the last post I argued that coordination is commitment—a vow to avoid futures with undesirable outcomes. I also raised a question: when…
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What Is Coordination, Really?
In an earlier post I argued that coordination is about ruling out futures that the world hasn't ruled out on its own. Waiting, ordering…
AI and the Mixed-Consistency Future
There's a growing consensus in the AI tooling world that goes something like this: databases are overkill for AI agents—just use files. You…
Coding Agents Meet Distributed Reality
AI is about to write most of the code in the world. Most of the code in the world participates in a distributed system. And distributed code…
Three Lenses on Coordination
Three Sets of Specs (for Staying in Spec) In the last post I talked about how systems formalisms are like sculpting with a chisel: we…
Algorithms Compute Functions. Systems Make Promises.
I've been having a lot of fun working on Hydro at AWS this fall. But over the winter break I stepped away from coding and had the space to…
Schema Evolution, Career Edition
🔔 For years I’ve been asserting that it’s time to change the way we write software…
Tips on Research
As a complement to my last post, I thought I'd write a follow-up with some constructive advice. No point complaining about negativity if you…
An Optimist's Reflection on SIGMOD
I write this note on my way home from the annual ACM SIGMOD conference, one of the top venues for data management research. In this post I…
CRDTs #4: Convergence, Determinism, Lower Bounds and Inflation
The CRDT literature sometimes leaves room for mathematical ambiguity. Maybe because the bulk of the work tends to be targeted at systems…
CRDTs #3: Do Not Read!
Ever used a CRDT, thought you were safe, and—boom—you bought a Ferrari you didn't mean to? It could happen to you! The truth is that CRDTs…
CRDTs #2: Turtles All the Way Down
After a lecture on cosmology, William James was challenged by a skeptic: "Your theories are incorrect. The Earth rests on a turtle," "And what holds up the turtle?" James asked. "Another turtle," came the reply. "And what holds that up?" pressed James. The skeptic was undeterred: "You can't fool me, sir. It's turtles all the way down." — Anecdote attributed to William James ([via J.R. Ross,…
A Run of CRDT Posts
Over the next few days, I'm going to post a number of observations about CRDTs: ~~Convergent~~ Conflict-free Replicated Data Types. These…
Looking Back to Look Ahead
This is the second of two background posts reflecting on my technical interests, to set some context for this blog. While there's no…
Context for a New Home
Time to get blogging again. After a long run with Data in Beta, it's nice to have a fresh start. WordPress was feeling clunky, and over time…