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Carol's Causal Conundrum: a zine intro to causally ordered message delivery

read original get Causal Ordering Message Queue → more articles
Why This Matters

This article introduces the concept of causally ordered message delivery, a key principle in distributed programming that ensures reliable communication between system components. Understanding and implementing this abstraction can improve the robustness and consistency of distributed systems, which are foundational to many modern applications and services.

Key Takeaways

A zine (pronounced like the last syllable in “magazine”) is “a small-circulation print or online publication that is produced through noncommercial means and is meant to appeal to a niche audience”. This page collects zines created by my students and me, all free to download, print, and distribute!

Carol’s Causal Conundrum

This zine is an introduction to causally ordered message delivery, a fundamental abstraction for distributed programming, and is the result of a six-month collaboration between my student collaborator Ayush Manocha and me, published in April 2026. We talk about what exactly causally ordered message delivery is, what problem it solves, and a few ways to implement it: two classic ways and one new way!

If you want a printed zine, download the booklet-formatted version and print double-sided with short edge binding. You’ll get double-sided pages that will be ready to fold into a booklet.

Communicating Chorrectly with a Choreography

This zine is an introduction to choreographic programming, and is the result of a six-month collaboration between my student collaborator Ali Ali and me, published in December 2024. Choreographic programming lets programmers describe the behavior of a message-passing system as a single, unified program that describes all the participants in the system and how they interact!

If you want a printed zine, download the booklet-formatted version and print double-sided with long edge binding. You’ll get double-sided pages that will be ready to fold into a booklet.

More zines created by my students

You may also be interested in “Fighting Faults in Distributed Systems”, another zine created by Ali Ali for my winter 2024 undergraduate distributed systems course.

For educators and researchers

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