Projects

Amaru

I work on Amaru, a Cardano consensus node in Rust. A second implementation is only as good as the tests one can run against it, so I spend most of my time on deterministic simulation of consensus and networking, including the pure-stage runtime.

Swarm protocols

With Alceste Scalas, Emilio Tuosto, Hernán Melgratti, Florian Furbach, Lucas Clorius and others I study compositional design and verification of swarm and local-first protocols (ECOOP, PLF, PLAID). The aim is a protocol one can implement, compose, and test without a coordinating cloud.

Local-First Cooperation

Working on factory automation at Actyx I concluded that robust systems have to start where the users are. In a factory that is a matter of availability; the same reasoning applies more generally. We should use what we have locally and treat the cloud as a loosely coupled extra. Actyx as a company is finished; the research continues above. The older writeup is in the archived repository.

Reactive Streams

I am honored to be part of the effort of standardizing mechanisms for implementing asynchronous and non-blocking stream handling on the JVM: Reactive Streams. The focus of this project is to define interfaces for transferring data items across an asynchronous boundary—be that a network connection or between CPU cores—in a fashion that includes flow control, does not require unbounded buffering and can be efficiently implemented in different languages or based on different execution engines.

This means that implementations are interoperable and users can pick and choose the most appropriate technology for each part of their application while still enjoying asynchrony and flow control across all components.