FediTest presentation at DWebCamp

Organized again by the Internet Archive, DWebCamp this year brought together over 500 technologists, rights advocates, activists, artists, entrepreneurs, social and otherwise, and many more, for 3+ days of conference and unconference under the California Redwoods.

Redwoods, tents and laptops in the same setting? Slide presentations and marshmallows? Apparently it works!

I had the opportunity to run a workshop on FediTest, and the larger question of how can we ever ensure the quality of large-scale decentralized, heterogeneous systems that we are now building, such as in the Fediverse.

We had a good session, good discussion, some high-quality questions that I think I managed to answer, and generally people seemed to appreciate the project. There was actually somebody in the audience who said he built a simpler version of this (because he had a homogenous network to test: every node running the same software, rather than a heterogeneous network: every node potentially running different software) and appreciated that we had figured out how to solve that harder problem.

Here are my slides. (Note: use Safari; Firefox mangles some of the graphics.)

Lots of details particularly about the key diagram aren’t on the slides, as I would explain those verbally. Come to the next FediTest meetup if you are interested in those.

P.S. Clearly I’m attempting to summon the forest spirit onto the session attendees.