Welcome, one and all to the Cambria project. Cambria is an ongoing research project here at Ink & Switch exploring how we can operate on evolving data formats in a decentralized system. We hope this work will be exciting not just for folks working on decentralized systems but could also be applicable more broadly to other distributed systems.
Cambria was motivated by some problems we kept seeing in our work. The most common problem was that someone would add an array field to a document. New documents would work fine (the array would be added at document creation time) but existing documents, or documents shared by older clients, would cause Javascript runtime errors when the code would try to call Array methods on the object.
This is a very common problem in all kinds of distributed systems, and in a centralised system is mostly managed by locking down how the system works. Database schemas prevent writing