Many of us use collaboration software such as Google Docs, Overleaf, Figma, or Trello every day. However, implementing real-time collaboration features in your own apps has long been technically challenging, and the resulting software is often fragile: it behaves poorly when the user’s internet connection is unstable, and service outages leave users locked out of their files.
Local-first software is an effort to make collaboration software less dependent on cloud services, and Automerge is an open-source library for realising local-first software. Automerge uses Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) to allow several users to concurrently update a file, and it automatically merges those updates into a consistent result. It provides data formats for efficiently storing this data and syncing it between users. It seamlessly supports both offline work and live real-time collaboration while users are online.
This talk will introduce our recent research on CRDTs, and provide an update on the latest developments in Automerge.
Martin Kleppmann is a research fellow at the Technical University of Munich, Germany. He was previously a research fellow at the University of Cambridge, and author of the bestselling O'Reilly book “Designing Data-Intensive Applications.” He works on distributed systems and security, in particular CRDTs and end-to-end encryption. In a past life, he was a software engineer and entrepreneur, co-founding and selling two startups, and working on large-scale data infrastructure at LinkedIn.
