We're especially happy to welcome Kevin Jahns to We Make Commons — creator of Yjs, the CRDT framework that quietly powers real-time collaboration across a huge share of today's collaborative software.
The engine behind collaborative editing
Yjs solves one of the hardest problems in distributed systems in a way that's usable by ordinary application developers: letting multiple people edit the same document at the same time, offline-tolerant, conflict-free, without a central server dictating the "true" version. It's the kind of foundational infrastructure most users never see and few developers fully appreciate — until they try to build real-time collaboration themselves without it.
An open source dependency hiding in plain sight
Yjs is embedded in an enormous range of tools, including — fittingly — the very Docs platform We Make Commons uses to publish this blog. Every time two people co-edit the same document without their changes clobbering each other, there's a good chance Kevin's work is doing the invisible heavy lifting underneath.
Why this matters for We Make Commons
Kevin's project is a perfect example of what "digital commons" actually looks like in practice: not a flashy end-user product, but a piece of shared infrastructure that makes dozens of other commons — including our own publishing stack — possible.
Welcome to We Make Commons, Kevin. Glad to have you.