Creating a collaborative app using CRDTs • Hacker News Board

Re: Creating a collaborative app using CRDTs

#11

Post by lewisjoe » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 11:54 AM UTC

iovrthoughtthis wrote: post #5

I found this hard to read. You state “I will explain later” a number of times. It would be better to hold off introducing the topic until it is more contextual to the reader. It breaks the flow of your writing. The text could be broken up into more paragraphs. You could use some more headings to break up sections: 1. What is a CRDT 2. What problem do they solve and some simple examples. 3. State based solutions 4. Op…

Honestly, CRDTs are quite complicated to understand. No amount of blog posts, research papers or diagrams will truly click (for most).

And like somebody else said in comments, most articles on CRDTs assumes the audience are math people. I'm working on a series of blog posts that slowly uncover how real-time collaboration algorithms and data-structures work – with all the necessary math concepts explained in simple terms first. Will publish them out as soon as they take a good shape.

Re: Creating a collaborative app using CRDTs

#12

Post by phedkvist » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 12:43 PM UTC

iovrthoughtthis wrote: post #5

I found this hard to read. You state “I will explain later” a number of times. It would be better to hold off introducing the topic until it is more contextual to the reader. It breaks the flow of your writing. The text could be broken up into more paragraphs. You could use some more headings to break up sections: 1. What is a CRDT 2. What problem do they solve and some simple examples. 3. State based solutions 4. Op…

Thanks for the feedback.

Great that you learned something. The CRDT papers don't explain the join-semilattice that much, it's only mentioned briefly, even though it's important in order to understand the theory behind CRDTs.

Re: Creating a collaborative app using CRDTs

#13

Post by phedkvist » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 12:47 PM UTC

lewisjoe wrote: post #11

iovrthoughtthis wrote: post #5

I found this hard to read. You state “I will explain later” a number of times. It would be better to hold off introducing the topic until it is more contextual to the reader. It breaks the flow of your writing. The text could be broken up into more paragraphs. You could use some more headings to break up sections: 1. What is a CRDT 2. What problem do they solve and some simple examples. 3. State based solutions 4. Op…

Honestly, CRDTs are quite complicated to understand. No amount of blog posts, research papers or diagrams will truly click (for most). And like somebody else said in comments, most articles on CRDTs assumes the audience are math people. I'm working on a series of blog posts that slowly uncover how real-time collaboration algorithms and data-structures work – with all the necessary math concepts explained in simple te…

I agree it is quite difficult to explain these concepts in simple terms. I spent a lot of time reading academic papers, as well as reading blog posts in order to grasp these concepts.

Good luck with your articles, where can I read them once you have published them?

Re: Creating a collaborative app using CRDTs

#14

Post by phedkvist » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 12:54 PM UTC

platz wrote: post #2

I had a lot of hope for crdt as a more general technique for client server communication, but it seems that usage of crdt for anything other that collaborative documents is pretty rare

I think CRDTs can be applied to more than just documents, and they can for sure be applied to client-server communication, and peer-to-peer for that matter.

I used CRDT to create a collaborative graph tool using the 2P2P-Graph. There is a pretty good Wikipedia page about CRDTs, which I recommend you read. It can definitely be applied to many use cases were the datatypes such as counters, sets, maps, sequences, etc are used.

Re: Creating a collaborative app using CRDTs

#15

Post by iovrthoughtthis » Wed, Apr 03, 2019, 8:39 AM UTC

lewisjoe wrote: post #11

iovrthoughtthis wrote: post #5

I found this hard to read. You state “I will explain later” a number of times. It would be better to hold off introducing the topic until it is more contextual to the reader. It breaks the flow of your writing. The text could be broken up into more paragraphs. You could use some more headings to break up sections: 1. What is a CRDT 2. What problem do they solve and some simple examples. 3. State based solutions 4. Op…

Honestly, CRDTs are quite complicated to understand. No amount of blog posts, research papers or diagrams will truly click (for most). And like somebody else said in comments, most articles on CRDTs assumes the audience are math people. I'm working on a series of blog posts that slowly uncover how real-time collaboration algorithms and data-structures work – with all the necessary math concepts explained in simple te…

True but I was commenting on the writing, not the concepts.