I’m happy to announce our next public tech talk, called Seven Implementations of Incremental, on Wednesday, April 5th, presented by yours truly. You can register here.
The talk covers the history of Incremental, a library for building efficient online algorithms. The need to update computations incrementally is pretty common, and we’ve found Incremental to be useful in creating such computations in a number of different domains, from constructing efficient financial calculations to writing responsive, data-rich web UIs.
The ideas behind Incremental aren’t new with us; there is a lot of prior art, most notably the work from Umut Acar’s work on self-adjusting computations, on which Incremental is most directly modeled.
But there’s a big gap between the academic version of an idea and a production ready instantiation, and this talk is about crossing that gap. It discusses the 7 different implementations we went through and the various mistakes we made along the way towards the current one we use in production.
So join us. I hope you enjoy seeing what we learned about building this kind of system, as well as hearing about the hilarious pratfalls along the way.
On another note, we have finally posted videos from our two previous talks, including Brian Nigito’s talk on the architecture of the modern exchange, and Arjun Guha’s talk on taming Puppet. And, of course, you can subscribe to our channel while you’re there.
