Immutable Web of Values (Downtown @ StartingBlock)

This month we will help David develop a talk he's proposing for Clojure/conj 2024. It will not be live streamed but we will record the practice talk to be submitted along with the proposal.

Location is downtown at StartingBlock.

Agenda:
- 6:30pm arrive and eat (pizza)
- 7:00pm talk
- 8:00pm official business ends, stay for informal discussion and food

Speaker: David Whittington

Talk: Immutable Web of Values

Description:

Do you like immutable values? Do you ever wish the web was made out of persistent data structures? There are real projects underway to make this happen.
Come to this talk to learn about the various efforts to construct large-scale decentralized storage systems, so we can finally have an immutable web of values. We'll cover things like IPFS, IPLD, Arweave, Filecoin, and other related technologies.
Warning: this talk will mention blockchains! If this is off-putting, do not fear! There will be plenty of non-blockchain content, and blockchains will be discussed purely as an implementation strategy to solve particular technical problems.

Bio
David Whittington is a system architect at PDS, Inc. where he is helping build ar.io, an access protocol for the Arweave perpetual data storage network. Previously he has worked on streaming metrics indexing and simulation testing for satellite systems, a ClojureScript strategy game (Zetawar), pharmacy claims processing systems, and early IaaC systems. He enjoys free software, permissionless systems, functional programming, optimizing databases, and immutability.