Developers often find themselves caught in the crossfire of web calls, databases, microservices and other remote interactions. In battling all the infrastructure, platforms, middleware and frameworks their architecture has amassed, plus the legacy of code they may have inherited, they often don't have the chance to take a step back and consider the fundamental nature of distributed systems — fundamentals that limit what is possible and shape everything from the user experience to the breadth of architecture and the detail of code.

This is not a talk about APIs, SDKs, middleware or specific architectural styles, but a view of the fundamentals from the perspective of history, physics, code and entertainment. This talk takes in causality, clocks, relativity, CAP theorem, the fallacies of distributed computing and more!