The Pub-Time Parliament • Jim Webber • YOW! 2025

This presentation was recorded at YOW! 2025. #GOTOcon #YOW
https://yowcon.com

Jim Webber - Chief Scientist at Neo4j & Visiting Professor at Newcastle University

RESOURCES
https://bsky.app/profile/jimwebber.org
https://twitter.com/jimwebber
https://github.com/jimwebber
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jim-webber-a3b5033
https://jimwebber.org

Links
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3642976.3653035
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/279227.279229
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.5555/2643634.2643666
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3427796.3427815
https://xkcd.com/1737
https://strangergraphs.com
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.04702

ABSTRACT
Imagine a busy pub on a Friday night. It's crowded, lots of people are talking at the same time. They're all exchanging information with each other which makes tiny changes in their brains. Some folks are taking it easy on the drink, a few are a bit tipsy after one too many beers, and my mate Stevo is plastered, falling off his barstool. Classic Stevo. Now imagine trying to get this crowd to agree on something when they can't even agree on which footy team is the worst this week and some of them can't remember their own names.

In comparison you'd think that getting a bunch of computers to agree on something, say a simple number would be pretty easy. Computers can do way smarter things than agreeing upon a number, right? Sadly not. Computers are often in various states of being wrong or crashing. Much like a bunch of drunks they all want to talk at the same time, and they're confident they have the best opinion.

How have we have built such incredible systems on such a flakey foundation?
In this talk we will visit classic consensus algorithms and see how they provide benefits of correctness and fault-tolerance for systems but at the price of reduced scalability. Then we'll explore some new research which aims to provide both correctness and scalability for distributed systems. The talk will be interactive - you may need a drink yourself afterwards. [...]

TIMECODES
00:00 Intro
02:04 Agenda
03:07 1. An apology
10:40 2. It's all ancient Greek to me
14:10 3. Empathy for resilient systems
17:42 4. Consensus for graphs
26:08 5. The RIOT protocol
32:27 Improving concurrency & throughput
35:24 Full RIOT
37:07 6. Evaluation
40:36 Outro

Download slides and read the full abstract here:
https://yowcon.com/brisbane-2025/sessions/3820

RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Jim Webber • Graph Databases • https://amzn.to/3l7k8hj
Free eBook version at https://graphdatabases.com
Nicki Watt & Aleksa Vukotic • Neo4j in Action • https://amzn.to/3oPmq8o

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#Algorithms #ConsensusAlgorithm #DistributedSystems #Microservices #FaultTolerance #DistributedConsensus #RIOTProtocol #Raft #Concurrency #JimWebber #Neo4j #YOWcon

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