Just as my previous FOSDEM talk, my presentation at FOSSASIA was titled “Designing a Human Centric Next Generation Internet”.

Trying to learn from the previous presentation – and having less time, and adding the pressure of a live event – I tried to focus more on a future Internet architecture.

The benefit of that approach is that it can be done as an analysis of the web’s more-or-less-achieved REST architecture and it’s successes and failures. Reading is certainly highly recommended!

The video starts about 8 hours and 20 minutes into the day, and the embed is set to begin just there.

Remember the early 90’s and Salt-n-Pepa? No? Well, it’s about breaking taboos around talking about important topics. In a vaguely comparable way, we software engineers have a kind of taboo on talking about . Let’s break that.

See, most of you will know what REST means, right? And the majority of my readers will be able to tell me that it stands for REpresentational State Transfer. And yet, my experience is that just about everyone misclassifies things as RESTful that are not. Worse, when I bring that up the often-heard response is that “well modern REST means something else” as if two decades of misusing a term somehow invalidates the original idea.

So today, I …

OK, so in the last post, I was getting into some channel capability flags, and how they impact handling of lost packets. The main conclusion for the purposes of that post was that we need some kind of sequence numbering in every packet, unless we just so happen to switch all reliability flags off.

Saving bits is a noble goal to be sure, especially when you have WiFi induced low MTU on the path. But I’m not sure that the extra branch you have to take for one of currently nine cases is worth saving them. You know what, let’s leave this decision for later. Personally, I am leaning to always sending sequence numbers, which can sometimes be ignored.

This post is all about how the …

In February, I was able to give a talk at FOSDEM, Europe’s premier conference on free and open source software. Entitled “Designing a Human Centric Next Generation Internet”, I tried to lay out the requirements such an Internet might have, derived from the failures of the current web.

FOSDEM'21: Designing a Human Centric Next Generation Internet

I suspect the talk was a little too unfocused, but the response was great nonetheless! It certainly helped me understand better how I need to present the Interpeer Project in future.