Wednesday, November 9, 2016

Events and Context, and cauliflower.

I was chatting with a friend yesterday about composability, events, and other distributed computing concepts.
He is quite a fan of doing composition at the point of consumption. Using the idea of eating family style - a group of people, a common table and piles of food. Each diner chooses what to put on their own plate and how to arrange it.

But there is a flaw which we discussed (maybe many flaws), but the one we talked about was what memories exist as well. So for example, when the food arrives, one of the vegetables is cauliflower. I generally like cauliflower (Hmm, how do I know that - where is that information stored?). However, I have had the cauliflower at this restaurant before (a couple of years ago) and it was awful. (Where is that information stored?).  The key point here is that when events (food delivered to table, say), there is both information that is directly pertinent to the event (what kind of food, when did it arrive, who brought it, what was the temperature) and information that lives in history (I don't like cauliflower here).  We need both sets of data in order for me to have a satisfactory meal.
And that is why in our systems we do have to manage and make available historical state - even when our systems are driven by events.

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