localfirst.fm #26 – Adam Fish: Ditto, Realm
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Jun 17, 2025 Adam Fish, co-founder and CEO of Ditto, discusses his journey from Realm to leading Ditto, an innovative syncing platform designed for resilient connectivity. He shares insights into the technical complexities of syncing systems and highlights the challenges of Bluetooth development. Fish delves into the choice of Rust for Ditto's programming, its applications in mobile and IoT, and the platform's unique schema-less document API. The conversation also touches on the transformation from airline industry tools to collaborative tech and the importance of community in technology.
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Early Sync Experience Leads to Realm
- Adam Fish started building a naive sync engine while creating a mobile CRM app around 2010-2012.
- This early tech experience led him to join Realm to work on a more advanced sync engine.
Realm's Operational Transformation Challenges
- Realm adopted operational transformation (OT) for syncing but it was very complex and hard to fully prove correct.
- OT presented unforeseen challenges that affected both the technology and Realm's business success.
OT's Scalability and State Challenges
- OT syncing algorithms have quadratic complexity, causing scalability problems with devices offline for long times.
- This unpredictability leads to server crashes and hard-to-solve state migration issues.