In computer systems, state is information that is remembered between interactions. A stateful service is one that keeps track of things that have happ

Jade Rubick - Communication is shared state

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2021-06-06 18:30:11

In computer systems, state is information that is remembered between interactions. A stateful service is one that keeps track of things that have happened before. Databases are where we typically store state, and we try to design our services so they don’t keep track of state themselves, but keep it in a central place.

People, as autonomous beings, require state. The way our thinking works literally requires it. So one of the great challenges of all organizations is distributing a shared understanding of reality: the organizations challenges, goals, and activities.

With computer systems, and with people, you can’t just copy state around. I can’t clone my brain, or even a part of my brain, and give it to you for you to understand perfectly what I’m thinking. So in computer systems, we serialize information to put it in a format that can be transmitted between machines.

Human communication is also serialized. We have to put what is in our minds into words or writing to share it with others. This is necessarily imperfect. It is actually impossible for us to express our internal state to each other, so we have to choose what to serialize, and create a facsimile of what we have in our minds.

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