Biology

Backpressure

In the 1950s, Toyota engineer Taiichi Ohno was watching American supermarkets and had an insight that would revolutionize manufacturing.

Digestive Standardization

Six hundred million years ago, evolution solved the hardest data engineering problem there is.

Eventual Consistency

The theoretical foundation was laid in 2000, when Eric Brewer conjectured (and Seth Gilbert and Nancy Lynch later proved) that a distributed system can provide at most two of three guarantees: Consistency, Availability, and Partition tolerance.

Feedback Loop

In 1788, James Watt attached a pair of spinning metal balls to a steam engine.

Garbage Collection

In 1959, John McCarthy was working on Lisp, one of the first programming languages, and hit a fundamental problem: programs allocated memory to store data, but programmers were terrible at freeing it when they were done.

Schema Migration

The problem crystallized in the 1990s when web applications started storing data in relational databases.

Separation of Concerns

The idea predates its name.

Structural Diffing and Merging

In 2005, Linus Torvalds had a problem.

Swarm Intelligence

In 1986, computer graphics researcher Craig Reynolds wanted to simulate flocking birds on screen.

Symbiotic Exchange

Roughly two billion years ago, a large cell engulfed a small bacterium — but didn't digest it.