Talk by Adam Fletcher.
Flying from BOS to SFO? You are interacting with a sophisticated set of systems, from flight search to booking to reservations to departure control, all of which have sit atop software written in the late 1950s. In this talk we'll follow a flight from booking to landing to demonstrate how each of these systems work and interact with each other and with you. We'll see how airline systems were early innovators in reliable distributed transactions, async messaging, store-and-forward networking, and predictable computing cost. We'll show just how complex flight search is (spoiler: incredibly) and why sometimes it is cheaper to fly from BOS to SFO via JNU.
Adam Fletcher built airline reservations system for ITA Software, an airline software company acquired by Google in 2011.