Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah - The REST Elevator Pitch:

"I've recently been thinking about defining the hardest problems I've encountered in software engineering, my cursory top 10 list:

• State
• Caching
• Latency
• Concurrency
• Search
• Metadata
• Persistence
• The Holy Grail Of Extensibility
• Structured data
• Character encoding

Now I'm not a database person so I handwaved away all of those data peoples' worries in one word: persistence."