My research group has a new paper, “CRDT Emulation, Simulation, and Representation Independence”, appearing at ICFP this year! This project was headed up by my PhD student Nathan Liittschwager, with help from another PhD student in my group, Jonathan Castello, and our collaborator Stelios Tsampas. You can read our preprint (warts and all, but soon to be improved, thanks to feedback from the ICFP reviewers) on arXiv, but here’s a quick summary.| decomposition ∘ al
I want to wrap up 2024 by talking about my friend Alan Jeffrey, who we lost this year.| decomposition ∘ al
It’s finally done! 🎉 I am so excited to announce “Communicating Chorrectly with a Choreography”, the first zine from my research group. You can read it online, or print your own free copies to read offline!| decomposition ∘ al
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The short version of this post: The last-ever !!Con is coming up in a month from today! Please spread the word about !!Con and get your tickets here!| decomposition ∘ al
You may or may not already know about !!Con (pronounced “bang bang con”), the radically eclectic, radically affordable conference of ten-minute talks about the joy, excitement, and surprise of computing!| decomposition ∘ al
Back in spring 2020, I was wrapping up the distributed systems course I was teaching, and for the last lecture, decided to spend a little time poking at the question of who actually invented vector clocks. Most people who need something to cite for vector clocks cite Friedemann Mattern’s “Virtual Time and Global States of Distributed Systems”, dated 1989 (although the workshop at which it originally appeared apparently actually took place in 1988), and Colin Fidge’s “Timestamps in M...| decomposition ∘ al
There’s a classic tradeoff between safety and liveness in the context of replicated data systems, originally proposed by Eric Brewer and later made precise by Seth Gilbert and Nancy Lynch. The idea is that, in a networked system of servers that is vulnerable to partitions (that is, where messages betweeen servers can be arbitrarily delayed, perhaps forever), it’s impossible to ensure both that when servers respond to requests, it’s with the “right” response (consistency, a safety pr...| decomposition ∘ al
This month, I had the honor of giving a very personal talk about distributed computing systems at Sunday Assembly Silicon Valley, which had the theme of “Connected” for our August meeting. I’ve been an SASV member and volunteer for a long time, but this is the first time I’ve been the speaker.| decomposition ∘ al
My research group was busy this past year. Here’s a summary of what we’ve been up to in 2022-2023!| decomposition ∘ al