Hello!

I’m Dr. Martin Kleppmann. I do various things:

• I am a research fellow at the Chair of Distributed Systems & Operating Systems at TU Munich, funded by a Freigeist Fellowship from the Volkswagen Foundation (which is independent from the car company, in case you were wondering). I previously spent seven years in research at the University of Cambridge, where I was supported by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship.
• I work on local-first collaboration software and distributed systems security, and I teach an undergraduate course on distributed systems.
• If you have found my work useful, please support me on Patreon. The income from Patreon goes towards supporting my research collaborators. Thank you to my supporters!
• In 2017 I published a book for O’Reilly, called Designing Data-Intensive Applications. It covers the architecture of a broad range of databases and distributed data processing systems, and it is one of the best-selling titles in the publisher’s entire catalogue.
• I am a regular speaker at conferences, and recordings of my talks have been watched over 500,000 times.
• I have worked on various open source projects including Automerge, Apache Avro, and Apache Samza.
• Between 2007 and 2014 I was an industrial software engineer and entrepreneur. I co-founded Rapportive (acquired by LinkedIn in 2012) and Go Test It (acquired by Red Gate Software in 2009).
• I have composed several musical works, including “Die Türme des Februar” (in German), a musical-dramatic adaptation of the book by Tonke Dragt, which premiered in 2007 with a cast of 150 people.

Feel free to contact me.

Recent blog posts

Things I have written recently.

• 12 Oct 2022: Verifying distributed systems with Isabelle/HOL
• 03 Jan 2022: Book Review: The Future of Fusion Energy
• 01 Sep 2021: Several podcast interviews
• 14 Apr 2021: It's time to say goodbye to the GPL
• 23 Feb 2021: Building the future of computing, with your help
• Full archive

Highlights

Older articles that have remained popular.

• 02 Dec 2020: Using Bloom filters to efficiently synchronise hash graphs
• 18 Nov 2020: New courses on distributed systems and elliptic curve cryptography
• 29 Sep 2020: Writing a book: is it worth it?
• 18 Jan 2018: Should you put several event types in the same Kafka topic?
• 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.

• 29 Jun 2023 at GOTO Amsterdam
• 29 Apr 2022 at Have You Tried Rubbing A Database On It? (HYTRADBOI)
• 05 Apr 2022 at 9th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data (PaPoC)
• 28 Mar 2022 at RainbowFS final workshop
• 07 Dec 2021 at 2nd International Workshop on Distributed Infrastructure for Common Good (DICG)
• Full archive

Publications

Work-in-progress drafts:

• Matthew Weidner, Joseph Gentle, and Martin Kleppmann. The Art of the Fugue: Minimizing Interleaving in Collaborative Text Editing. Preprint arXiv:2305.00583, April 2023.

Books:

• Martin Kleppmann and Mitch Seymour. Secret Colors: A Gentle Introduction to Cryptography. Round Robin Publishing, April 2022.
• Martin Kleppmann. Designing Data-Intensive Applications. O’Reilly Media, March 2017.

Peer-reviewed papers in journals and top-tier conferences:

• Geoffrey Litt, Sarah Lim, Martin Kleppmann, and Peter van Hardenberg. Peritext: A CRDT for Collaborative Rich Text Editing. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (PACMHCI), Volume 6, Issue CSCW2, Article 531, November 2022. doi:10.1145/3555644
• Matthew Weidner, Martin Kleppmann, Daniel Hugenroth, and Alastair R. Beresford. Key Agreement for Decentralized Secure Group Messaging with Strong Security Guarantees. ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), November 2021. doi:10.1145/3460120.3484542
• Martin Kleppmann, Dominic P. Mulligan, Victor B. F. Gomes, and Alastair R. Beresford. A highly-available move operation for replicated trees. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems 33(7):1711–1724, October 2021. doi:10.1109/TPDS.2021.3118603
• Daniel Hugenroth, Martin Kleppmann, and Alastair R. Beresford. Rollercoaster: An Efficient Group-Multicast Scheme for Mix Networks. 30th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2021.
• 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
• 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 papers in other conferences and workshops:

• Martin Kleppmann. Making CRDTs Byzantine Fault Tolerant. 9th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data (PaPoC), April 2022. doi:10.1145/3517209.3524042
• Peter van Hardenberg and Martin Kleppmann. PushPin: Towards Production-Quality Peer-to-Peer Collaboration. 7th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data (PaPoC), April 2020. doi:10.1145/3380787.3393683
• Martin Kleppmann. Moving Elements in List CRDTs. 7th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data (PaPoC), April 2020. doi:10.1145/3380787.3393677
• 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. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-57043-9_23
• 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 — Best Presentation Award! :-)
• 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 unrefereed reports:

• Karissa Rae McKelvey, Scott Jenson, Eileen Wagner, Blaine Cook, and Martin Kleppmann. Upwelling: Combining real-time collaboration with version control for writers. Ink & Switch, March 2023.
• Martin Kleppmann and Peter Alvaro. Research for Practice: Convergence. Communications of the ACM, volume 65, issue 11, pages 104–106, November 2022. doi:10.1145/3563901
• Martin Kleppmann. Assessing the understandability of a distributed algorithm by tweeting buggy pseudocode. University of Cambridge, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Technical Report UCAM-CL-TR-969, May 2022. doi:10.48456/tr-969
• Martin Kleppmann. Harm reduction for cryptographic backdoors. 14th Workshop on Hot Topics in Privacy Enhancing Technologies (HotPETs), July 2021.
• Martin Kleppmann. Thinking in Events: From Databases to Distributed Collaboration Software. Keynote at 15th ACM International Conference on Distributed and Event-based Systems (DEBS), July 2021. doi:10.1145/3465480.3467835
• Martin Kleppmann and Heidi Howard. Byzantine Eventual Consistency and the Fundamental Limits of Peer-to-Peer Databases. arXiv:2012.00472 [cs.DC], December 2020.
• Martin Kleppmann. Implementing Curve25519/X25519: A Tutorial on Elliptic Curve Cryptography. Draft manuscript, October 2020.
• 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
• 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.
• Alastair 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. doi:10.48456/tr-683 — Prize for best undergraduate dissertation! :-)