Hello!

I'm Martin Kleppmann — researcher, software engineer, entrepreneur, author and speaker. I am a researcher in distributed systems at the University of Cambridge Department of Computer Science and Technology. In 2017 I published a book for O'Reilly, called Designing Data-Intensive Applications. In my past startup life I co-founded Rapportive (acquired by LinkedIn in 2012) and Go Test It (acquired by Red Gate Software in 2009).

I care about making stuff that people want, great people, a culture of respect and empathy, clarity of thinking, marvellous user experiences, maintainable code and scalable architectures.

I'd love to hear from you, so please leave comments, or feel free to contact me directly.

Recent posts

Things I have written recently.

• 27 Jun 2019: Figuring out the future of distributed data systems (interview)
• 18 Jan 2018: Should you put several event types in the same Kafka topic?
• 15 Mar 2017: Drawing a map of distributed data systems
• 26 Jan 2017: The probability of data loss in large clusters
• 15 Apr 2016: Announcing TRVE DATA: Placing a bit less trust in the cloud
• Full archive

Highlights

Older articles that have remained popular.

• 08 Feb 2016: How to do distributed locking
• 11 May 2015: Please stop calling databases CP or AP
• 04 Mar 2015: Turning the database inside-out with Apache Samza
• 25 Nov 2014: Hermitage: Testing the “I” in ACID
• 05 Dec 2012: Schema evolution in Avro, Protocol Buffers and Thrift
• 07 Mar 2011: Accounting for Computer Scientists
• 05 May 2010: Valuation caps on convertible notes, explained with graphs

Conference talks

Events where I will be speaking or have spoken.

• 14 Sep 2019 at Strange Loop
• 11 Jul 2019 at Hydra distributed computing conference
• 07 Jun 2019 at TNG Big Techday
• 04 Jun 2019 at Hochschule Aalen
• 15 May 2019 at TU Kaiserslautern
• Full archive

Publications

Books:

• Martin Kleppmann: “Designing Data-Intensive Applications”. O’Reilly Media, March 2017.

Peer-reviewed journal papers:

• Stephan A. Kollmann, Martin Kleppmann, and Alastair R. Beresford: “Snapdoc: Authenticated snapshots with history privacy in peer-to-peer collaborative editing”. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PoPETS), Vol. 2019, Issue 3, July 2019. doi:10.2478/popets-2019-0044
• Martin Kleppmann, Alastair R. Beresford, and Boerge Svingen: “Online Event Processing: Achieving consistency where distributed transactions have failed”. Communications of the ACM, Volume 62, Issue 5, pages 43-49, May 2019. doi:10.1145/3312527
• Victor B. F. Gomes, Martin Kleppmann, Dominic P. Mulligan, and Alastair R. Beresford: “Verifying Strong Eventual Consistency in Distributed Systems”. Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages (PACMPL), Vol. 1, OOPSLA, Article 109, October 2017. doi:10.1145/3133933 — Distinguished Paper Award and Distinguished Artifact Award! :-)
• Martin Kleppmann and Alastair R. Beresford: “A Conflict-Free Replicated JSON Datatype”. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems 28(10):2733–2746, April 2017. doi:10.1109/TPDS.2017.2697382

Peer-reviewed conference and workshop papers:

• Martin Kleppmann, Adam Wiggins, Peter van Hardenberg, and Mark McGranaghan: “Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud”. ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software (Onward! ’19), October 2019. doi:10.1145/3359591.3359737
• Diana A. Vasile, Martin Kleppmann, Daniel R. Thomas, and Alastair R. Beresford: “Ghost trace on the wire? Using key evidence for informed decisions”. 27th International Workshop on Security Protocols, April 2019.
• Martin Kleppmann, Victor B. F. Gomes, Dominic P. Mulligan, and Alastair R. Beresford: “Interleaving anomalies in collaborative text editors”. 6th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data (PaPoC), March 2019. doi:10.1145/3301419.3323972
• Martin Kleppmann, Stephan A. Kollmann, Diana A. Vasile and Alastair R. Beresford: “From Secure Messaging to Secure Collaboration”. 26th International Workshop on Security Protocols, March 2018. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-03251-7_21
• Martin Kleppmann and Conrad Irwin: “Strengthening public key authentication against key theft”. 9th International Conference on Passwords, December 2015. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-29938-9_9

Invited papers, book chapters, and reports:

• Martin Kleppmann, Victor B. F. Gomes, Dominic P. Mulligan, and Alastair R. Beresford: “OpSets: Sequential Specifications for Replicated Datatypes (Extended Version)”. arXiv:1805.04263 [cs.DC], May 2018.
• Martin Kleppmann, Victor B. F. Gomes, Dominic P. Mulligan, and Alastair R. Beresford: “OpSets: Sequential Specifications for Replicated Datatypes (Proof Document)”. Archive of Formal Proofs, May 2018.
• Martin Kleppmann: “Apache Samza”. In: Encyclopedia of Big Data Technologies, Springer, March 2018. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-63962-8_197-2
• Victor B. F. Gomes, Martin Kleppmann, Dominic P. Mulligan, and Alastair R. Beresford: “A framework for establishing Strong Eventual Consistency for Conflict-free Replicated Datatypes”. Archive of Formal Proofs, July 2017.
• Alistair R Beresford and Martin Kleppmann: “Data Governance and Modern Computer Systems”. British Academy and Royal Society workshop on the governance of data and its uses, July 2016.
• Martin Kleppmann: “Making Sense of Stream Processing”. O’Reilly Media, May 2016.
• Martin Kleppmann and Jay Kreps: “Kafka, Samza and the Unix philosophy of distributed data”. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin 38(4):4–14, December 2015.
• Martin Kleppmann: “A critique of the CAP theorem”. arXiv:1509.05393 [cs.DC], September 2015.
• Martin Kleppmann: “Simulation of colliding constrained rigid bodies”. University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory, Tech Report UCAM-CL-TR-683, April 2007. — Prize for best undergraduate dissertation! :-)