Vivekbala A

Vivekbala A

Learning and Building PaperLand

I learn from young learners of new ways to make math alive. Big believer in the ways of Seymour Papert, Alan Kay and Joe Armstrong of forcing the computer to understand your understanding, by creating a recursive world of understanding where you’re not quite sure if you’re teaching the machine or if the machine is teaching you.

Talk:
The Hitchhikers Guide to Distributing Code & Math Across the Africa

In the beginning, Joe Armstrong created Erlang and it was good. There was a network. Processes could finally talk to each other, nodes could find each other. There was no WIFI. There was no Android kernel engineer dropping multicast packets. There was no Internet.

Running reliable distributed software in the Africa harkens back to the early days, except for the conspicuous lack of trusty network cables filling up the room.

Join us on our journey to distributing software in the most unlikely places to find reliable networking in the 21st century.

From distributing self-hostable software on USB sticks to debugging distributed gossip-based broadcast networks in school computer labs 10,000 miles away with the help of a trusty community of mathophiles we befriended along the way.

Key Takeaways:

  • The future of learning math in The Gambia
  • How to distribute Elixir software where there is no internet
  • How to craft better realtime collaborative experiences in scrappy network conditions.
  • Why creating software of this kind matters.

Target Audience:

  • Those who love scrappy software
  • Those who need to push the BEAM to its limits for distribution
  • Those who care about how software can uplift learning culture.
  • Those who dream about the future of math education.