Developer Experience with the Collabs Library

Live demos

Collabs itself

Collabs talk recording

Background Reading

https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/: Blog post that introduces the high-level goal of Collabs.

Yjs, Automerge: Libraries with similar functionality to Collabs, but rather different APIs. These are what we want to compare against.

“Tackling Consistency-related Design Challenges of Distributed Data-Intensive Systems: An Action Research Study” (link, arXiv version): User study in a related area (programming distributed data systems). We won’t have time to do experiments as involved as theirs, but it can at least serve as inspiration if you end up running a user study.

“In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm” (paper): Another distributed systems paper with a user study, this time evaluating student comprehension of a consensus protocol that was supposed to be simpler than prior protocols.

Contacts

Matthew Weidner (PhD student) - maweidne@andrew.cmu.edu

Heather Miller (Faculty) - hmiller2@andrew.cmu.edu