I See What You Mean — Peter Alvaro (Strange Loop 2015)
Eleven years after delivery, “I See What You Mean” remains the single best talk on why distributed systems are hard as a language design problem, not as an engineering problem. Peter Alvaro — now a professor at UC Santa Cruz, then a Berkeley PhD finishing the BOOM project — walks through a decade of research on Dedalus and Bloom and ends with the CALM theorem: a precise, syntactic answer to the question “when does a distributed program need coordination, and when can we get away without it?...