How Cambridge Researchers Built the Invisible Infrastructure Behind Google Docs and Figma
The CRDT origin story traces how a small group of researchers starting with Marc Shapiro, Nuno Preguiça, Carlos Baquero, and Marek Zawirski in 2011 solved the hardest problem in collaborative software: making sure everyone's edits fit together, even when no one is talking to each other.
There is a moment every software engineer remembers: the first time they opened a shared document and watched someone else's cursor move across the screen in real time. No dialog box asking who wins. No lost keystrokes. Just two people, typing together, and the document somehow knowing how to hold all of it. That seamlessness has a name, even if most users never hear it. It is called a CRDT a conflict-free replicated data type. And the story of how it came to exist is a story about a handful of researchers who saw...
Read more