Distributed Systems

CRDTs and the Quest for Distributed Consistency

What are you working on lately?

I've been at the University of Cambridge, doing research full time now, which is really cool, I get to go deep into interesting topics. Most of my work there has been on CRDTs, which is what I shall talk about in the talk. That is, data structures which can be modified on several different devices at the same time by several different users, and they automatically ensure a good degree of consistency. If people are editing stuff at the same time, they ensure that everyone ends up with the same document on their screen at the end. The structural integrity of the document is maintained.

Is this an introductory talk? Intermediate talk? What's the level of expectation walking into the talk?

I'm not expecting people to know much about CRDTs already, but I don't want to make it just a pure introductory talk because there have been loads of those already. I'll give a quick introduction so we are all on the same level, and then move on to some recent developments. We have been working quite hard on this topic for over two years now and have some new results that haven't yet been published in papers, and that haven't yet made their way into the software engineering community because some of the theoretical papers are quite forbidding. I want to take the core ideas of what we've figured out more recently and communicate that to a broader audience.