Instant: a graph real-time database for the browser and its internals

Instant is a graph real-time database for the browser written in Clojure, and lots of the ideas are inspired by Datomic. Stepan Parunashvili will take us through it and its internals. Here's the abstract:

---

Real-time features like multiplayer, optimistic updates, and offline mode are becoming table stakes for modern applications. Delivering these features is tricky and often require custom solutions: teams at Figma, Linear, and Notion have all built custom sync engines. A generalization of their work looks like a database in the browser: developers create queries, queries are cached locally and subscribe to the changes they care about. We built a complete implementation at Instant. In this talk, we'll go over the architecture, the challenges and insights: storing data, evaluating queries, routing novelty, and handling permissions.

Stepan Parunashvili is the co-founder of Instant (YC S22), a graph database for the browser. Stepan started his career as an engineer at Wit.ai, a natural language API acquired by Facebook in 2015. He spent 4 years on the messenger platform at Facebook, and was a staff engineer for Airbnb Payments. Stepan first used Clojure at Wit.ai in 2014, and has been a convert since.