Forem: Brooklyn Zelenka 🏳️‍🌈

A Universal Hostless Substrate for a Post-Serverless Future at Øredev 2019

Brooklyn Zelenka 🏳️‍🌈 — Tue, 12 Nov 2019 18:22:12 +0000

Brooke was at Øredev 2019 in Malmö, Sweden and presented a talk covering the evolution of server architecture that we call "hostless". This also serves as a high level technical roadmap for what we're working on here at Fission. We've shipped IPFS support, and will move on to identity using zero-knowledge proofs and DIDs, and distributed compute with WASM and smart contracts.

While those are a blizzard of next-gen technology concepts, we're integrating them in such a way as to make them usable and turnkey. The outcome is a better developer experience (DX).

Key takeaways:

There has been a 60-year progression of server architecture, and there is one final phase left
There have been recent advances in cryptography, distributed systems, and web infrastructure
It is possible to store data and run computation anywhere , even on untrusted machines
Remove the concept of “local development”, “production”, and “deployment” entirely

The last 60 years has seen the rise and fall of several models of computing: mainframes, private server, shared hosting, containers, and serverless (to name a few). We have one final phase left: “hostless” or universal apps. By leveraging technologies like secure multiparty compute, the content-addressable web, blockchain, and the rise of WASM, we are seeing the beginnings of a future liberated from specialized providers, acting on a distributed substrate of store and compute.

With all this in place, users fully control their own data (and it never touches your servers), deployment is as simple as setting a flag on your local environment, and developers maintain zero infrastructure.

Come learn about what is being built today for the next wave of computing, how we evolve past the serverless paradigm, and how it can make life simpler for developers and end users!

The slides are available on Notist.

Open Collective Interview with Brooke

Brooklyn Zelenka 🏳️‍🌈 — Fri, 21 Jun 2019 19:10:47 +0000

Alanna Irving from the Open Collective team interviewed m on Witchcraft: the magic of math, functional programming, and community.

Did you know she started in music composition?

Programming absolutely scratches the same part of my brain as music composition. Instead of writing instructions for an instrumentalist, you’re writing it for a computer, but the parallels are very clear. All but one person in my composition cohort (who became a professor of music) are now programmers, because it was a crash course in that way of thinking.

It's a great overview of Brooke's background, her love of functional programming and math, and the Witchcraft library for Elixir:

witchcrafters / witchcraft

Monads and other dark magic for Elixir

Witchcraft is a library providing common algebraic and categorical abstractions to Elixir Monoids, functors, monads, arrows, categories, and other dark magic right at your fingertips.

README

Quick Start

def deps do
  [{:witchcraft, "~> 1.0"}]
end

# ...

use Witchcraft

Library Family

Quark    TypeClass
    ↘    ↙
   Witchcraft
       ↓
     Algae

Name	Description
`Quark`	Standard combinators (`id`, `compose`, &c)
`TypeClass`	Used internally to generate type classes
`Algae`	Algebraic data types that implement `Witchcraft` type classes

Values

Beginner Friendliness

You shouldn't have to learn another language just to understand powerful abstractions By enabling people to use a language that they already know, and is already in the same ballpark in terms of values (emphasis on immutability, &c), we can teach and learn…

View on GitHub

You can follow Brooke here on DevTO as @expede:

Brooklyn Zelenka 🏳️‍🌈Follow

Edit: Is third person weird when you're talking about yourself???