I Am SO Glad I'm Uncoordinated!

Sometime around 1962 or 1963, I was six or seven years old. I was trotted down to the Little League field and told I should sign up. It wasn't too bad standing in the outfield until I understood they were SERIOUS that I should move into the path of the approaching ball! The odds of me lining up the mitt to the oncoming ball were vanishingly small. I lasted less than a week in Little League. So, I took up reading books and that's served me well. I am truly glad that I'm uncoordinated! In this paper, we're going to look at how computing has evolved through the years. The act of coordinating to share stuff hurts more and more over time. We'll first examine how this has changed and continues to change. Then, we'll look at how we can reduce and sometimes eliminate these challenges over time. I've seen tremendous changes since I dropped out of college in 1976. The nature and character of our designs continue to evolve as technology advances. Stuff that used to be easy is now hard. Stuff that used to be hard is now easy. The way we write data has begun an inexorable change from updating the single copy of some data to adding new versions to a log of changes. Similar to the way accountants only add journal entries, our systems are appending their intention to make changes to a log. This means the data we store is immutable. Being immutable means, it is more easily managed in a distributed environment, avoiding the difficulties of read-modify-write. Also, we can bundle appended log writes into one batched append.