Laurens Duijvesteijn

Distributed Disarray

Can you build a skyscraper in a swamp? With a solid foundation, you might.

In this talk we'll cover some of the ridiculous things you're going to have to put up with if you want to execute your application on multiple computers. Highlights include the laws of physics and Murphy, "random" numbers, timezones plus all the fun that comes with them, and the network.

This introductory talk requires no knowledge of the field. In it you will:

• Learn what makes distributed systems so darn difficult.
• See what approaches exist to building a reasonably solid foundation.
• Potentially reflect on the problems and technical debt that exist in your own applications, and what to read so you stand a chance to fix it.

Representing Papers We Love

Laurens is speaking on behalf of Papers We Love, a user group for reading and talking about computer science papers.

About

Laurens studies computer science at Utrecht University and is intrigued by the limitations and possibilities of distributed systems. He spends his free nights reading papers, hacking in Elixir/Erlang. He is also a co-organizer of the Utrecht chapter of Papers We Love.