03-23, 17:00–17:30 (America/Los_Angeles), Warehouse
Best practices for building the distributed web in a way that actually works — and a sort of “lessons learned” from the last 5 years or so of not always succeeding. A look at why "the new internet" hasn't taken over yet, despite significant investment, and how we can get there still.
Starting on Bitswap, I've worked on IPFS protocols and systems since 2018. At the beginning, I was satisfied to devise new protocols and "hack on cool stuff". But I've become frustrated by the lack of concrete adoption of content addressing on a mass scale. I want software that can benefit billions of people to be used by billions of people, and I've been thinking a lot about why that hasn't quite happened yet. This talk will include some of my ideas on how I think we might get there.
Hannah Howard has made contributions across the IPFS ecosystem for 5 years. She wrote parts of Bitswap, all of Graphsync, most of the initial Filecoin markets protocols, and most recently Lassie, a universal retrieval client for IPFS in Go. Hannah is now lead engineer of the W3S venture, focusing delivering hot, decentralized, content addressed storage and retrieval at a global scale. Before all this, Hannah just wrote web apps for people, and before that, she spend 10 years working in non-profits.