#Abstraction

 Workflows, a new abstraction for distributed systems

For the past 45 years, the database systems community has enjoyed an unparalleled developer experience: Database Transactions mitigate challenges such as failure on a platform level, entirely eliminating these challenges on an applications level. Unfortunately, the distributed systems community has not enjoyed a similar developer experience: There was no equivalent abstraction that mitigates challenges like failure on a platform level. However, many companies, including Snap, Uber, and Netflix, are adopting a new paradigm: Workflows. Workflows are to distributed systems what transactions are to databases. This talk explores how Workflow Systems mitigate challenges on a platform level and provide a developer experience for distributed systems that rivals the developer experience for databases, allowing you to literally code as if failure does not even exist!

Abstraction Architecture Design Video

Nov 7 2022

 Unconditional Code • Michael Feathers

Many systems are full of error checks and conditional logic. They introduce discontinuities that make reasoning difficult. In this talk, Michael Feathers will present a conceptual framework for dealing with errors, conditionality and decision making at the level of code, architecture and user interface. Often by changing design and revisiting requirements we can make various error cases impossible, and make code and architecture simpler as well as more robust.

Abstraction Design Video

Mar 18 2021