This talk was given at Midwest.io 2015.

Nearly 40 years ago, Leslie Lamport wrote the seminal work "Time, Clocks and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System". Ever since then academia and industry have been struggling with the implications of this sentence: "In a distributed system, it is sometimes impossible to say that one of two events occurred first."

(Of course, Albert Einstein didn't need Lamport to point that out.)

If the fundamental laws of physics stand in our way, what can we do to track causality?

Among other topics we'll discuss Lamport timestamps, CRDTs, NTP, and databases. Expect the dreaded concept of "eventual consistency" to rear its head. Often.

Attendees are expected to have an inquisitive mind, but no other prerequisites are required. You should not expect to come away with any packaged solutions to your problems, but you'll have a greater awareness of the pitfalls you'll face as distributed systems become the norm in this era of mobile computing, cloud computing, and big data.

About the Speaker

John Daily has wandered a meandering path through systems and network administration, cyber security, global iOS mobile device management, technical evangelism, and software development. He currently helps develop the Riak NoSQL database for Basho.

He has a passion for pragmatic programming languages such as C, Perl, and Erlang. Beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder.