I started with the glimmer of a hope that perhaps network sync could be made stateless, went down a months-long rabbit-hole of research, and ended up writing a novella-length article about CRDTs: http://archagon.net/blog/2018/03/24/data-laced-with-history/
So many days spent thinking, sketching, trying to swallow a concept that seemed far to big for my jaws—only to suddenly find myself on the other side, with this arcane knowledge fully internalized.
Going from a few wayward thoughts to a working proof-of-concept was the most professionally satisfying thing I've done. It felt like alchemy.
That might be mine as well, https://medium.com/@raphlinus/towards-a-unified-theory-of-op... . It's very much unfinished work though. Certainly wrapping my head around the OT and CRDT literature took huge amounts of brainpower exertion, comparable to what I did for my PhD.
Also, I have your essay in my queue to read more thoroughly, it's high on my list of stuff to study as we possibly rethink the way this stuff works in xi-editor.
Hey Raph, thanks for the vote of confidence! I spent a lot of time looking through your research on OT and CRDTs (plus your Rope Science series) in the course of writing my article, especially as documented and implemented in xi. Really fascinating stuff. I love how many different ways there are to approach this problem.
I found it a few months ago, read it through the end, and shared it with my team. It's the best survey of synchronization techniques that I've come across.
So many days spent thinking, sketching, trying to swallow a concept that seemed far to big for my jaws—only to suddenly find myself on the other side, with this arcane knowledge fully internalized.
Going from a few wayward thoughts to a working proof-of-concept was the most professionally satisfying thing I've done. It felt like alchemy.