Draft:Justin Sheehy
 | Review waiting, please be patient.
This may take 5 weeks or more, since drafts are reviewed in no specific order. There are 2,572 pending submissions waiting for review.
Where to get help
How to improve a draft
You can also browse Wikipedia:Featured articles and Wikipedia:Good articles to find examples of Wikipedia's best writing on topics similar to your proposed article. Improving your odds of a speedy review To improve your odds of a faster review, tag your draft with relevant WikiProject tags using the button below. This will let reviewers know a new draft has been submitted in their area of interest. For instance, if you wrote about a female astronomer, you would want to add the Biography, Astronomy, and Women scientists tags. Editor resources
Reviewer tools
|
Justin Sheehy is a software engineer whose work has focused on distributed systems.[1]
He served as Chief Technology Officer of Basho Technologies and also has held roles at MITRE, VMware, and Akamai Technologies.[2][3]
Reporting on Basho's leadership changes in 2014, The Register said that Sheehy and Basho chief architect Andy Gross had "spearheaded technical development" of the company's Riak distributed database.[4]
Sheehy's technical work and writing include the Bitcask[5] storage engine, the Webmachine[6] web framework, and essays about distributed computing. His 2015 essay "There Is No Now"[7][8], about time in distributed systems, appeared in ACM Queue and Communications of the ACM and has been referenced in multiple books about distributed systems and data architectures.[9][10]
Career
In 2013, Silicon published a profile of Sheehy centered his work in distributed computing. When The Register reported Sheehy's departure from Basho in March 2014, it said that he and Gross had both been with the company since its formation six years earlier. The book Seven Databases in Seven Weeks described Sheehy as a core developer of Riak.[11] One day after reporting Sheehy's departure from Basho, The Register also reported that he was joining VMware as site leader for the company's Cambridge office and would perform architecture and engineering work in the area of storage and availability. By 2024, InfoQ referred to Sheehy as chief architect for infrastructure engineering and operations at Akamai. That year, InfoQ also reported on his opening keynote at its Boston Dev Summit on how to be a responsible software developer amidst the hype around AI.[12]
Distributed systems work
In O'Reilly's book Planning for Big Data, editor and author Mike Loukides said that Sheehy's framing of NoSQL as a movement rather than a technology "immediately felt right" and Loukides credited Sheehy with that characterization which was used for the name of a chapter in that book.[13] The book chapter used that description as the basis to discuss NoSQL as a movement for greater choice in database architecture.
With David Smith, Sheehy authored the 2010 design report for Bitcask, a log-structured key-value storage engine developed for use with Riak. Alex Petrov later referred to Bitcask in the book Database Internals as an example of an unordered log-structured storage engine.[14]
Sheehy and Steve Vinoski also published "Developing RESTful Web Services with Webmachine" in IEEE Internet Computing in 2010. The article described Webmachine, a framework written in Erlang based around a decision flow graph derived from the HTTP specifications.
Technical writing
In 2015, Sheehy published "There Is No Now: Problems with Simultaneity in Distributed Systems" in ACM Queue and a version of the essay was published in Communications of the ACM that May. The essay discusses the effects of communication delay, failures, and imperfect clock synchronization on attempts to determine or assume a single instantaneous state across a distributed system. Dean Wampler's O'Reilly book Fast Data Architectures for Streaming Applications included "There Is No Now" among references recommended for further exploration of the subject. Martin Kleppmann cited the essay in the chapter "The Trouble with Distributed Systems" of his 2017 book Designing Data-Intensive Applications. The OOPSLA paper Verifying Strong Eventual Consistency in Distributed Systems referred to "There Is No Now" for their reasoning that relying on physical time to define the order of messages would be problematic in distributed systems.[15]
Sheehy's essay "Why Vector Clocks Are Hard" was cited by Carlos Baquero and Nuno Preguiça in their 2016 Communications of the ACM article "Why Logical Clocks Are Easy"; the authors also acknowledged Sheehy among those who provided feedback on their work.[16]
References
[edit]- ↑ Smolaks, Max (25 October 2013). "IT Life: The Future Of Computing Is Distributed". Silicon. Retrieved 4 September 2026.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ↑ Clark, Jack (11 March 2014). "CTO of NoSQL database upstart Basho beams over to VMware". The Register. Retrieved 4 September 2026.
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ↑ "Justin Sheehy". InfoQ Dev Summit Boston 2024. Retrieved 4 September 2026.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ↑ Clark, Jack (10 March 2014). "Basho's CEO, CTO and chief architect leave the NoSQL upstart". The Register. Retrieved 4 September 2026.
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ↑ "Bitcask: A Log-Structured Hash Table for Fast Key/Value Data" (PDF). Bitcask: A Log-Structured Hash Table for Fast Key/Value Data. Retrieved 4 September 2026.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ↑ Sheehy, Justin; Vinoski, Steve (11 March 2010). "Developing RESTful Web Services with Webmachine". IEEE Internet Computing. 14 (2): 89–92. doi:10.1109/MIC.2010.35. ISSN 1089-7801.
- ↑ Sheehy, Justin (10 March 2015). "There is No Now: Problems with simultaneity in distributed systems". Queue. 13 (3): 20–27. doi:10.1145/2742694.2745385. ISSN 1542-7730.
- ↑ Sheehy, Justin (2015-04-23). "There is no now". Communications of the ACM. 58 (5): 36–41. doi:10.1145/2733108. ISSN 0001-0782.
- ↑ Kleppmann, Martin (2017-04-02). Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems. O'Reilly Media. ISBN 978-1-4493-7332-0. OCLC 976434277.
- ↑ Wampler, Dean (2016). "Where to Go from Here". Fast Data Architectures for Streaming Applications. O'Reilly Media. ISBN 978-1491970751.
- ↑ Redmond, Eric; Wilson, Jim (2012). Carter, Jacqueline (ed.). Seven Databases in Seven Weeks: a guide to modern databases and the NoSQL movement. Lewisville, TX: Pragmatic Bookshelf. ISBN 978-1-934356-92-0. OCLC 897116873.
- ↑ Hoblitzell, Andrew (26 June 2024). "InfoQ Dev Summit Boston: Being a Responsible Developer in the Age of AI Hype". Retrieved 4 September 2026.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ↑ Loukides, Mike (2012). Planning for Big Data. O'Reilly_Media. ISBN 978-1-4493-3334-8.
- ↑ Petrov, Alex (2019). Database Internals: A Deep Dive into How Distributed Data Systems Work. O'Reilly Media. p. 152. ISBN 979-8212392259.
- ↑ Gomes, Victor B. F.; Kleppmann, Martin; Mulligan, Dominic P.; Beresford, Alastair R. (2017-10-12). "Verifying strong eventual consistency in distributed systems". Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages. 1 (OOPSLA): 1–28. doi:10.1145/3133933. ISSN 2475-1421.
- ↑ Baquero, Carlos; Preguiça, Nuno (2016-03-23). "Why logical clocks are easy". Communications of the ACM. 59 (4): 43–47. doi:10.1145/2890782. ISSN 0001-0782.