Martin Kleppmann
Martin Kleppmann is a researcher at the University of Cambridge working on distributed systems, data-intensive applications, and local-first software. Before academia he worked as a software engineer and entrepreneur, including at LinkedIn (via the Rapportive acquisition), building large-scale data infrastructure.
He is the author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications (O’Reilly, 2017), which became one of the standard references for how databases, message queues, and distributed systems actually work underneath the tools built on top of them.
His more recent work is on local-first software and CRDTs (conflict-free replicated data types), including the Automerge library — collaborative, offline-capable applications that don’t route every edit through a central server.
Key works
- Designing Data-Intensive Applications (2017)
- Automerge (CRDT library for local-first applications)
- “Local-first software” (paper, with the Ink & Switch research group)