The Internet was designed as a decentralized system.
Theoretically, if Alice wants to send an email to Bob, she can set up an email client on her computer and send that email to Bob’s email server on his computer. In reality, very few people run their own email servers. We all send our emails to centralized services like Gmail, and connect to those centralized services using our own client—a browser on our laptop or a mobile application on our smart phone.
Gmail is popular because nobody wants to run their own email server—it’s too much work. With Gmail, our emails our centralized, but centralization comes with convenience.
Similar centralization happened with online payments.
Decentralization is a desirable feature of computer systems. So how do we make more of our applications decentralized?
Martin Kleppman is a distributed systems researcher and the author of Data Intensive Applications. Martin is concerned by the centralization of our computer networks, and he works on CRDT technology in order to make it easier for people to build peer-to-peer applications.
Most of the people who know how to build systems with CRDTs are distributed systems PhDs, database experts, and people working at huge internet companies. How do you make developer-friendly CRDTs? How do you allow random hackers to build peer-to-peer applications that avoid conflicts? Start by making a CRDT out of the most widely used, generalizable data structure in modern application development: the JSON object.
In today’s episode, Martin and I talk about conflict resolution, CRDTs, and decentralized applications. This is Martin’s second time on the show, and his first interview is the most popular episode to date. You can find a link to that episode in the show notes for this episode, or you can find it in the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS and for Android. In other podcast players, you can only access the most recent 100 episodes. With these apps, we are building a new way to consume content about software engineering. They are open-sourced at github.com/softwareengineeringdaily. If you are looking for an open source project to get involved with, we would love to get your help.
Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.
