Vancouver Systems #4 featured two talks.
A Digital Ecosystem That Is Free as in Democracy
The digital systems we build shape the society we live in. Despite this, as views on its direction change rapidly, the architecture of our distributed systems (thin clients on consumption-oriented devices offloading all compute to foreign hyperscalers) hasn't changed, both for a genuinely lack of replacement tech and gatekeeping by Apple and Google, making them inaccessible to most. Thanks to very recent P2P improvements, new personal computing platforms built entirely on Free Software and Open Hardware, and regulations finally factoring in the risks technologists have advocated for decades, this is changing rapidly, forcing us to fundamentally re-think how apps are designed. This talk introduces a new stack to fix this, from the lowest level, hardware (RISC-V) up through the kernel (Linux), userspace (systemd/GNOME/Flatpak), app design (libadwaita), new local-first, post-internet transports (Bluetooth, NAN, Mesh, sneakernet) and the high-level libraries for distributed systems on top of them (p2panda, Loro CRDT), with the goal of making this new generation of apps just as user-friendly as the existing ones, if not more.
Felicitas Pojtinger (@pojntfx) is Head of Research and Development at Loophole Labs, where she works mostly on low-level userspace and live migration of containers and virtual machines. By night, she contributes to various Free Software projects as a member of the GNOME Foundation and a board member at VanLUG. She's the developer of weron, a WebRTC overlay networking tool, bofied, a Go network boot server, the go-nbd library, and more.
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Streamling: Building a Lightweight Data Streaming Framework on Apache DataFusion
Apache DataFusion is a very popular extensible query engine written in Rust that uses Apache Arrow as its in-memory format. Many analytical databases and query engines use DataFusion as a foundation. But can you extend it to build a data streaming framework? In this talk, I'll cover the lessons learned from extending DataFusion to support streaming. We'll look into how well most of the existing components can be leveraged with little or no modifications. We'll also see how modern features, like implementing TypeScript support via WebAssembly, can be integrated with the Arrow format.
Yaroslav Tkachenko is a Software Engineer, Consultant, and Advisor specializing in data streaming & data-intensive applications. Currently, Yaroslav is a Founder at Irontools, consulting companies that need to design, build and evolve efficient data streaming systems. Previously, Yaroslav was a tech lead at Shopify, Activision, and several startups.
Brought to you by
This series is organized by Cameron Morgan and Kir Shatrov.
Inspired by NYC Systems and DC Systems.