NodeJS packages don't deserve your trust

A modest proposal Another week, another npm supply chain attack. Yikes! People on hacker news are wringing their hands about what should be done. The problem seems dire. Apparently I couldn't help myself. At 2am the other night I woke up, staring at the ceiling. I couldn't stop thinking about…

5000x faster CRDTs: An adventure in optimization

A few years ago I was really bothered by an academic paper. Some researchers in France put together a comparison showing lots of ways you could implement concurrent editing, using various CRDT and OT algorithms. And they benchmarked all of them. (Wow, yess!) Some algorithms worked reasonably well. But others…

I was wrong. CRDTs are the future

I saw Martin Kleppmann’s talk a few weeks ago about his approach to realtime editing with CRDTs, and I felt a deep sense of despair. Maybe all the work I’ve been doing for the past decade won’t be part of the future after all, because Martin’s…

Home is where the bits flow

We aren’t purely physical beings. Most of our day exists outside our body. Our minds slip out through our eyes, out into our screens. We become a different kind of organism, living in a weird symbiosis with reddit and whatsapp and gmail. When was the last time you noticed…

An API for data that changes over time

What do all these things have in common? RSS feeds Gamepads and MIDI devices An email client Filesystem watching (FSWatch, kqueue, ionotify, etc) Web based monitoring dashboards CPU usage on your local machine Kafka RethinkDB Changefeeds A Google Docs document Contentful's sync protocol Syntax highlighting as I type in my…

War over being nice

Quick question: Bob says something to James. James is upset and goes to have a cry about it. Who is responsible for James being upset? Is it Bob, for being mean? Or is it James, because he obviously has emotional development to do? If there's 100 points of responsibility, how…