“Carol’s Causal Conundrum” is out!

The newest zine from my research group, “Carol’s Causal Conundrum”, is out today! You can read it online, or print your own free copies to read offline! This zine is an introduction to causally ordered message delivery, a fundamental abstraction for distributed programming. It’s the result of a six-month collaboration between my student collaborator, Ayush Manocha, and me. In the zine, we talk about what exactly causally ordered message delivery is, what problem it solves, and a few ways to implement it: two classic ways, and one new way! I’ve been making research zines collaboratively with undergrads since 2024; “Communicating Chorrectly with a Choreography”, a zine about choreographic programming, was our first one. After the success of that first zine project, I began looking for a student who wanted to work on a follow-up. Ayush, who had just taken my undergrad programming languages course, was keen to help, and we began tossing around ideas. My grad students Yan Tong and Nathan…