Whoop, whoop. I’m in luck. It seems I have found a sponsor for a ticket for GOTO;!

Now that I dare hoping to attend, I have started to study the details of the program. One of the tracks has a day called “Distributed Systems Renaissance”, and that caught my interest, because distributed systems is a part of my day job.

One talk in particular caught my interest: “The Smallest Distributed System”. In distributed systems, one of the challenges is being robust to systems falling out and comming back online. This could be due to errors like network problems or due to planned downtime. No matter what, the rest of the system should continue to run and when the missing part is back online, it should be able to catch up whith what have happend while being down. Think of cash machines, that can run whithout connection to the bank. It happily hands out money and when it reconnects to the bank, all of the transations are transmitted. This also implies, that the account balance might not reflect how much money you actually have left the account, as some transactions might still be only in the cash machine. But eventually all transactions will be transmitted, so eventually the balance will be correct. This is more or less what eventual consistency is about, and this talk promis to address these issues.

Where I work, we have a produktion system holding about 1.2 million customers. Most of it is build from the ground up, and for the newest and most central parts, we have used things like Clojure and Datomic – and it’s distributed. Though I have been interested in and been building distributed systems for years now, there a still loads of stuff I should and could learn. I’m really hoping this talk can give me some more insight.

But man – when a glance through the program. It’s like a candy store and I’m starving.