July 16, 2012
At long last, here’s the second of two talks from last month’s RiakChats meetup. (The first talk, “Escape Hatches in Go” from Jeff Hodges, is already available.)
Neil Conway is a CS graduate student from Berkeley focusing on data management and distributed systems. He and his colleagues have been hard at work on some powerful research that’s already having some impact on those building and running systems in production.
Bloom is a language purpose-built for distributed systems. CALM, which stands for “Consistency As Logical Monotonicity”, is a technique for proving out code to run in an eventually-consistent environment. Neil gives an overview of these, and then discusses recent work on extending Bloom to support a broader range of programs, with a focus on something that’s become increasingly-interesting to us at Riak called CRDTs.
This should be required watching for anyone who cares about the future of efficient distributed programming: aside from the fascinating work he and his colleagues are doing, Neil is an excellent presenter and does a great job of distilling abstract computing concepts into something developers might actually be able to apply in production.
Enjoy.
