Top all-time · #1426
Christopher Meiklejohn
Personal blog · christophermeiklejohn.comprogrammingsystemsai
Christopher Meiklejohn's personal blog at christophermeiklejohn.com covers programming, systems and ai. Since 2013, 52 different Hacker News readers have linked it 118 times, most often “Readings in distributed systems”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Distributed systems researcher and technical lead. Staff Engineer at DoorDash, adjunct faculty at CMU. From award-winning research to Azure, AWS, and production Erlang systems.
Most-linked posts?
- Readings in distributed systems9 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2013-07-13
- Orleans vs. Erlang and Riak Core5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2015-05-03
- Software Engineering Is Becoming Civil Engineering4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-04-01
- Distinguishing Lasp from Bloom^L: Programming System vs. Programming Model3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-03-02
- Readings in conflict-free replicated data types2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-07-22
- High-performance, exactly-once, failure-oblivious distributed programming (2018)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-12-15
- Automagically generate verified vector clocks Erlang code from Coq2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-11-05
- Stateful Experiments on AWS Lambda2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-03-10
- Programming Models for Distributed Computing: Remote Procedure Call2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-04-12
- Hermes2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-03-07
What Hacker News says?
I've come to the conclusion that "MVC" is the problem with web client apps. Now that there are several choices for doing MVVM using a functional reactive programming style, we really should move beyond the simplistic MVC concept. Here is one pointer to more info http://christophermeiklejohn.com/frp/javascript/clojurescrip... and down near the bottom he has a link to the HN discussion of his article.
Comment linking /frp/javascript/clojurescript/2013/06/13/functional-reactive-programming.html
on “Software in 2014”Submitted Towards a Type System for Containers and AWS Lambda to Avoid Failures [pdf] as a story · 180 points
HN discussionI'll also admit to having difficulty understanding how is all this distinct from non-CRDT replication mechanisms. Great mission and work by DeuxFluers team btw. Bonne chance! Edit: Blogs on Riak's use of CRDTs: http://christophermeiklejohn.com/erlang/lasp/2019/03/08/mono... https://web.archive.org/web/20170801114916/http://docs.basho... https://naveennegi.medium.com/rendezvous-with-riak-crdts-par... )
Comment linking /erlang/lasp/2019/03/08/monotonicity.html
on “Garage, our self-hosted distributed object storage solution”Submitted Stateful Experiments on AWS Lambda as a story · 165 points
HN discussionhttps://christophermeiklejohn.com/pl/2016/04/12/rpc.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDWZyYHj2XM Christopher is far better than i will ever be at explaining it. In general, RPC have some fundamental problems, among other, they need you to ship the full context.
Comment linking /pl/2016/04/12/rpc.html
on “15 Years of Concurrency”Submitted High-performance, exactly-once, failure-oblivious distributed programming (2018) as a story · 129 points
HN discussionAh, I'll put it in as a note in the beginning. You can see a more basic introduction in a previous post I wrote: https://interjectedfuture.com/trade-offs-between-different-c... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38916647 Here's some introductory material I found helpful: - [An interactive intro to CRDTs]( https://jakelazaroff.com/words/an-interactive-intro-to-crdts... ) - [An introduction to state-based CRDTs]( ht…
Comment linking /crdt/2014/07/22/readings-in-crdts.html
on “CRDTs Turned Inside Out”Submitted Applied Monotonicity: A Brief History of CRDTs in Riak as a story · 118 points
HN discussionVery briefly: Process calculus, such as the pi-calculus and join calculus. Prototype implementation in Scala here: https://github.com/Chymyst/chymyst-core Lasp and Bloom: http://christophermeiklejohn.com/lasp/2018/03/02/lasp-vs-blo...
Comment linking /lasp/2018/03/02/lasp-vs-bloom.html
on “Message Passing and the Actor Model”Submitted Readings in distributed systems as a story · 111 points
HN discussionDistributed systems. My website is located here: http://christophermeiklejohn.com .
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on “Ph.D. 2.0: Rethinking the Ph.D. Application”Submitted Distributed data structures with Coq as a story · 97 points
HN discussionComparison of Orleans with Erlang and Riak Core: http://christophermeiklejohn.com/papers/2015/05/03/orleans.h...
Comment linking /papers/2015/05/03/orleans.html
on “Microsoft Orleans – An approach to building distributed applications in .NET”Submitted The Red Wedding Problem: Write Spikes at the Edge and a Mitigation Strategy [pdf] as a story · 86 points
HN discussionI assume Lineage Driven Fault Injection stuff [1] has some overlap with Eve's ability to tell you "Why is this blank?": The datalog model allows you to find the logical dependencies of results. Some other bloom related links: - Anna KVS[2] showed up recently on hacker news[3] and morning paper[4] - Lasp lang is in the same space[5], Christopher Meiklejohn has a comparison with bloom[6] [1]: https://disorderlylabs.gi…
Comment linking /lasp/2018/03/02/lasp-vs-bloom.html
on “Bloom Programming Language”Submitted A Certain Tendency of the Database Community as a story · 73 points
HN discussionThis is very interesting. It seems like a much more user-friendly version of TLA+. Wonder what Lamport thinks about it :) I think the next logical feature would be to have Runway compile a model-checked specification to an actual C++/Java/go/python implementation, using something like Thrift or CapnProto RPC codegen. There has been some work on doing similar spec->implementation compilation from Coq to erlang [0] bu…
Comment linking /coq/erlang/2013/11/19/verified-vector-clocks-an-experience-report-part-2.html
on “Introducing Runway, a distributed systems design tool”Submitted Understanding Why Resilience Faults in Microservice Applications Occur as a story · 48 points
HN discussionSome more great resources: This is a list of many of the most influential white papers: http://christophermeiklejohn.com/distributed/systems/2013/07... This is an associated podcast: http://thinkdistributed.io/ This is mixu's book on distributed systems: http://book.mixu.net/distsys/single-page.html This is the MIT reading list: http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.852/05/papers/
Comment linking /distributed/systems/2013/07/12/readings-in-distributed-systems.html
on “Distributed systems readings”Submitted What Is Chaos Engineering? as a story · 31 points
HN discussionA comparison with Erlang/OTP: http://christophermeiklejohn.com/papers/2015/05/03/orleans.h...
Comment linking /papers/2015/05/03/orleans.html
on “The Case for Building Scalable Stateful Services”Submitted Verified Vector Clocks: An Experience Report, Part 2 as a story · 29 points
HN discussiondon't overlook the link in Robinson's upper right page http://henryr.github.io/distributed-systems-readings/ also: http://christophermeiklejohn.com/distributed/systems/2013/07...
Comment linking /distributed/systems/2013/07/12/readings-in-distributed-systems.html
on “Distributed systems for fun and profit”Submitted Readings in conflict-free replicated data types as a story · 25 points
HN discussionI hadn't really given F# serious consideration, i know it's based off of OCaml but looking at it now i'm not particularly enamoured by the idea of managing threads, or doing async programming. Yes it does have an actor model but it looks limited to just a message box. I think Microsoft Orleans is the most interesting functional language based on .Net http://christophermeiklejohn.com/papers/2015/05/03/orleans.h...
Comment linking /papers/2015/05/03/orleans.html
on “Why Go gets criticized so much”Submitted Readings in distributed systems as a story · 15 points
HN discussionRelated work: PPDP '17 paper on scaling: http://christophermeiklejohn.com/publications/ppdp-2017-prep... Ensuring monotonicity via types: http://prl.ccs.neu.edu/blog/2017/10/22/monotonicity-types-to...
Comment linking /publications/ppdp-2017-preprint.pdf
on “A Case Study in LASP and Distribution at Scale [video]”Submitted Orleans vs. Erlang and Riak Core as a story · 13 points
HN discussionI was fortunate enough to work at Basho, where CRDTs were part of nearly every technical discussion about how to progress Riak. One of my former co-workers, Chris Meiklejohn, continues to push forward with CRDTs via Lasp[0]. He has a good list of reading materials[1] that it doesn't look like he's maintained recently but should still be useful. Guess I'll plug my meta-list of distributed systems reading lists[3] (de…
Comment linking /distributed/systems/2013/07/12/readings-in-distributed-systems.html
on “Schism: A library of CRDT implementations of Clojure’s core data types”Submitted Readings in distributed systems as a story · 13 points
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