(2020-09-21) Pereira Diverse Distributed Databases

Jason Pereira: Diverse Distributed Databases. Following my gut from last week (2020-09-14-PereiraCollidingSpatialIdeas), I experimented a little this week with Cloudflare workers, making a tiny app.

One of the metrics that matter most for libraries, infrastructure providers, APIS, and any other creative tool is time to fun. It seems like the Cloudflare Workers team is intentionally optimizing for this, and they kind of nail it.

This on it’s own isn’t that fun. You can do the same with many serverless and serverful tools alike. What really get’s that dopamine firing for me, is making use of Workers KV.

Directly in my script I have access to a persistant, fast, simple datastore. I don’t have to provision anything, set any configuration strings, or worry about where the data is going to live. It just happens. Even though it’s quite limited, this just feels incredibly powerful.

Part of what makes Workers KV is it’s distributed.

This is exciting from the lens of a single developer (“Look at all the things I don’t have to worry about”), but becomes even more so when you look at distributed communities around these databases.

We haven’t yet seen “end user” applications at scale that take advantage of these systems, but they’re tailor made for a new generation of social tools. While the growth of Web 2.0 companies drove the creation of massive data silos, the promise of Web 3.0 is in truly networked applications

An interesting piece of news in this vein is Roam’s API announcement. If Conor and Co can pull it off Roam could be the distributed database at the heart of a new wave of networked thinking tools.

I want to build a tool for spaced repetition (SRS) that can be an element of a course, that a learner can add to their personal deck, and that allows other courses to refrence your recall rate for particular items.