Much of the software we use derives its value from being networked, sometimes that's about being able to use software on many devices, often it's about being able to collaborate with other people. This has enabled enormous productivity improvements and made us all more flexible, but it has a cost. The networked part of these applications is almost always inside a private entity, which means if that entity goes away - maybe it's acquired by a competitor, or just decides you aren't worth the money, or any of a hundred other things which we've all seen happen - then the people who derive value from the software are left with a useless app.
How could we make it possible for users to repair these broken apps? I'll describe how a set of design principles called "local first" enables us to build networked software which can outlive the companies that created it. We'll explore the current state of the technologies which enable this approach, and also some of the open problems and the opportunities which are arising in a world increasingly wary of depending on large corporate networks.
Speaker
Alex Good
Software Engineer @Ink & Switch, Core Contributor on the Automerge CRDT Library
Alex Good works full time as a maintainer of the open source Automerge library. He spent a large chunk of his career building and maintaining distributed systems of ever increasing levels of complexity. One day, he decided that he couldn't face writing another server in order to ship bytes from his phone to a data centre in another city and then back to his laptop and so he started working on generic open source sync protocols.
Date
Monday Apr 7 / 01:35PM BST ( 50 minutes )
Location
Mountbatten (6th Fl.)
