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CRDTs and Collaborative Playground
Learn about Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types, Yjs, and how we built a collaborative, real-time playground in a web browser.
The concept was formalised in 2011 when a group of very smart researchers came together and presented a paper on the topic; initially motivated by collaborative editing and mobile computing, but its adoption has spread to numerous other applications in the years that followed. Kevin was the first to introduce a rather clever optimization in the underlying data model which has since become a de facto industry standard: representing a more complex tree-type structure in a single flat list. When someone loads up the given playground, they make a request to the UI backend, which calls this Go service to retrieve the binary blob, deserializes it into Yjs's CRDT state, and then syncs that back down with the user.
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