BugBash'26 Morning of Day 1

Continuing with notes from the BugBash talks. Yes, all of this goodness, including Will Wilson's keynote was before lunch the first day.Where all the ladders startPeter Alvaro, Associate Professor of Computer Science @ UC Santa CruzIn this talk, Peter reflects back on his 20 years of distributing systems work. The cover image is Don Quixote (which is Peter) attacking the windmill (robust distributed systems) with a spear (which is some singular solution often borrowed from databases).The first attack was through the use of arcane algebras. This is a purist approach of getting it right the first time. This was during Peter's PhD at UC Berkeley, where Neil Conway was also a peer and collaborator.In his own admission, this was incited by a naive framing around what makes distributed systems difficult? The target was uncertainty regarding order and timing, which cause distributed consistency problems, and require coordination. But distributed coordination comes at the cost of latency,…