Last day of my internship!

-
It was hard to leave the University of Washington Networks Lab, where I've been working this summer. (That being said, I might come back winter break.) Thank you to Bonnie, Ray, Will, Tom, Danyang, Donny, and Yuchen for an unforgettable ten weeks!

Ray, Will, and their team have been developing Radiatus and freedom.js, a new programming model for designing web apps. Radiatus relies on message passing and isolated user containers, unlike frameworks such as Express or Django, which have centralized servers.

Using Radiatus and freedom.js means more flexibility and privacy, but as of now there are also some pain points:

  • Long message chains. An extra "social provider" layer in addition to the traditional frontend, backend, and database. When we send data from one user to another, we have to pass the message through the first user's frontend, backend, and social provider, and then through the second user's social provider, backend, and frontend. 
  • Error propagation. If our bug involved message passing, we had to track it down step by step. Also, there was a domino effect, so the next steps were also affected after the point where a message was dropped or corrupted.  
  • Lack of documentation. As of now :-) 

Bonnie and I developed blizi, a web app on top of Radiatus and freedom.js. An excerpt from our paper:

blizi (blizi.radiatus.io) is a social web app created with Radiatus and freedomjs to facilitate sharing and reviewing research papers. Software like HotCRP, Authorea, and ResearchGate already exist, but we believe blizi has additional uses these others may lack. HotCRP is intended for conferences, Authorea is designed for collaboration between co-authors, and access to ResearchGate is limited to researchers at institutions. blizi is versatile and open to all, from colleagues exchanging papers, to students in seminars collecting reviews, to professors requesting feedback. 
Check out our public repositories: blizi and freedom.js. If you try out the app and notice any bugs, please file them!

I've also attached the rest of our paper...






Popular posts from this blog

Space Race: a simple Rust game built on the Bevy framework

-
Image
When I saw a post announcing the release of the Bevy framework  (an open source game engine written in Rust), I thought it'd be a fun way to learn Rust.  So I made Space Race , a 2 player game on top of the Bevy framework. How to Play The Astronaut moves around collecting jewels (using WASD keys). The Alien moves around trying to catch the Astronaut (using arrow keys).  The Astronaut wins if they collect at least 5 jewels and make it back to home base before the Alien catches them.  The Alien wins otherwise.  Things I learned about Rust  I had a lot of fun making & playing this game, and also got some hands on experience with Rust like working with structs enums vectors iterators traits dyn trait vs impl trait  dyn trait is used for trait objects, which are fat pointers made up of 1) a pointer to the value 2) a pointer to a vtable. A vtable is a table of methods, where each method points to its implementation, generated once at compile time. Each i...
Read more

Building a Toy Language Compiler in Go

-
Image
A follow-up to my previous post about building a toy language interpreter in Go. Throughout this post, I'll be referencing my repo . We'll go over a compiler which translates source code to machine code, and then a VM to execute this machine code. What is a compiler?  A compiler takes source code and translates it to executable machine code . (See my previous post for more details.) The figure below shows the high-level architecture of a simple compiler. Like the interpreter we built previously, our compiler has a lexer and a parser which turn our source code into an AST . This is our compiler's frontend . However, that's where a compiler diverges.  The compiler may translate the AST into at least one internal representation (IR) . The IR(s) may be represented using any data structure (even another AST!), but they should follow two rules: (1) be easy to produce, (2) be easy to translate into the target machine code. The IR can also be optimized...
Read more

tldr: Raft + Implementation Tips

-
Image
Part of the tldr series , which summarizes papers I'm currently reading. Inspired by the morning paper . Raft (Extended Version) + Implementation Tips [2014] Ongaro et al. Note: For implementation tips, see the end of this blog post.  Introduction Consensus algorithms The r eplicated state machine approach  is useful for providing fault-tolerance in distributed systems. It lets a cluster of unreliable machines continue operating even when some of its members fail. In this approach, machines   usually use a replicated log to stay in sync. As shown in the figure below, each server's log stores the same commands in the same order. Every state machine executes commands from its own log in order. State machines are deterministic, so each produces the same order of outputs. Once the majority of machines have responded, the command is done executing. Consensus algorithms ensure that the replicated log stays consistent. In the figure above, clients s...
Read more