The CRDT Dictionary: A Field Guide to Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types
Back around 2014, I kept hearing about this cool database called Riak, a distributed database that could survive network partitions and keep accepting writes. Some really interesting companies were using it at massive scale, and I was curious about it. One of the big selling points was that it could handle concurrent writes without any coordination or consensus. I was intrigued, and I started reading about it. Underlying all of this was the concept of CRDTs, Conflict-free Replicated Data Types.1 At the time, I was working on a beer startup called Brewtown with a friend: a beer review social site and delivery subscription service. It failed for other reasons, but I was a little too enamored with and shiny tech back then, and CRDTs and Riak fit the bill for shiny tech. I kept trying to…
