Many of us have devoted decades of our lives to making databases faster, cheaper, more scalable, more reliable… much of which is completely irrelevant to the average developer. The main obstacle for the next generation of app developers is convenience. The “serverless revolution” and architectures like Jamstack demonstrate a desire for life without a backend team, yet current technologies in this sphere are poorly suited to truly dynamic/interactive content. Convex is a database and execution platform designed to allow developers to build dynamic applications without having to deal with caching, invalidation, data distribution, or operating a backend.

This talk is part of the Vaccination Database (Second Dose) Tech Talk Seminar Series.

Bio:
James Cowling is cofounder and CTO at Convex, the zero-setup scalable backend designed for the needs of reactive app developers. Prior to founding a startup James was Senior Principal Engineer at Dropbox and was primarily responsible for technical strategy in Persistent Systems and Infrastructure, including multihoming the company, rearchitecting the filesystem sync protocol, building databases that process millions of queries per second, designing a multi-exabyte distributed storage system and moving the company off S3, amongst other projects. Before joining industry James received his PhD at MIT specializing in large-scale distributed transactions and consensus protocols.

More Info: https://db.cs.cmu.edu/seminar2021-dose2#db12