Brooklyn is a distributed systems researcher, and is currently leading a local-first access control project at Ink & Switch. She is the author of numerous Elixir libraries including Witchcraft & Exceptional, and founded the Vancouver Functional Programming Meetup.
Her belief in open standards has lead to work spanning distributed VMs (Ethereum, IPVM), authorization (UCAN), data privacy (Webnative FS, RhizomeDB), multiformats, and others.
Erlang was designed for reliability in telephone switches, but its core principles — isolated processes, message passing, “let it crash supervision — anticipated problems we’re only now grappling with at scale. Four decades later, these ideas are finding new expression in local-first software: apps that work offline, sync peer-to-peer, and put users back in control of their data.
In this joint keynote, Robert Virding (Erlang co-creator) and Brooke Zelenka trace the intellectual lineage from telecom switches to CRDTs and capabilities. They’ll explore how Erlang’s fault-tolerance model maps onto modern challenges, distributed security, and systems that continue to work offline. The cloud promised to simplify distributed systems; instead concentrated in a handful of companies; perhaps the answers we need were hiding in a language designed for phone switches all along.