Causal Islands

About Causal Islands

Causal Islands is about connecting people across industries, disciplines, and communities to share, design, and learn about the future of computing together.

Fragile narrow laggy asynchronous mismatched pipes kill productivity - Tristan Hume

Something I’ve been thinking about recently is how when I’ve worked on any kind of distributed system, including systems as simple as a web app with frontend and backend code, probably upwards of 80% of my time is spent on things I wouldn’t need to do if it weren’t distributed. I came up with the following description of why I think this kind of programming requires so much effort: Everything is fragile narrow laggy asynchronous mismatched untrusted pipes. I think every programmer who’s worked on a networked system has encountered each of these issues, this is just my effort to coherently describe all of them in one place. I hope to prompt you to consider all the different hassles at once and think about how much harder/easier your job would be if you did/didn’t have to deal with these things. I think this is part of why web companies like Twitter seem to have so much lower impressiveness per engineer productivity than other places like game companies or SpaceX, although there’s other pieces to that puzzle. While part of the difficulty of distributed systems is inherent in physics, I think there’s lots of ideas for making each part of the problem easier, many already in common use, and I’ll try to mention lots of them. I hope that we as programmers continually develop more of these techniques and especially general implementations that simplify a problem. Like serialization libraries reducing the need for hand-written parsers/writers, I think there’s a lot of developer time out there to save by implementing generalized solutions where we currently painstakingly reimplement common patterns. I also think all these costs mean you should try really hard to avoid making your system distributed if you don’t have to.

Causal Islands Los Angeles · Luma

Causal Islands LA is the first community edition of the 2023 conference held in Toronto in 2023. Causal Islands at a high level is about the future of…

Why Distributed Systems Are Hard to Develop — and How to Fix It

Here’s what’s missing when developing distributed systems today: Structure. Consistent, codified structure.

Timeline

Thinking Machines Inc. develops a new Internet protocol dubbed WAIS. Users can download a WAIS client to search through an array of distributed servers and access the documents stored there. The protocol supports fuzzy searching, custom tailored results, and decentralized data storage, but ultimately loses out to the web.

Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media | Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Collaborative and social computing theory, concepts and paradigms

Atmospheric Computing Research Proposal

Atmospheric computing research proposal exploring interconnected computing islands and cloud infrastructures enabled by open social protocols.