You Keep Using That Word
summary
Argument: the word asynchronous is too vague and causes real mistakes. Evidence: people mean different things — non-blocking (futures, reactive extensions, gRPC clients), message broker / inbox pattern (Kafka, queues, temporal decoupling), event-driven vs request–response, or simply latency expectations. Practical takeaways: describe whether calls must return, whether processing is stateless, how failures are handled, and use precise terms; the distributed systems textbook barely uses “asynchronous” (about four mentions), so stop relying on it.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Intro
- 2:36Synchronous vs asynchronous
- 7:59What I found might shock you!
- 9:20Reactive manifesto
- 13:23Blocking calls
- 24:13Broker-based request-response
- 26:53Competing definitions
- 27:24Context
- 32:13Sociotechnical system
- 37:49Outro
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