You Keep Using That Word: Asynchronous And Interprocess Comms
summary
Argues that “asynchronous” is ambiguous and instead distinguishes request–response vs event-driven interactions, shows request–response can be implemented with blocking calls or with futures/reactive extensions to make it non-blocking vs blocking, and demonstrates how an intermediary like a message broker with guaranteed delivery buys temporal decoupling and encourages stateless handlers. Uses shipping/returns and stock/promotion examples, highlights parallelizing calls to cut latency, warns about stateful instances, and urges explicit terms (non‑blocking, broker X, idempotency) rather than the single word asynchronous.
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chapters (14)
- 0:00Intro
- 2:00Asynchronous and asynchronous communication
- 7:14Pat Helen
- 9:35Darren Hobbs
- 15:37Nonblocking calls
- 23:38Temporal Decoupling
- 26:08Message Brokers
- 36:29Stateless Processing
- 37:16Words have different meanings
- 38:47The study of meaning
- 43:40Sociotechnical
- 45:04The Tower of Babel
- 47:24Concretely
- 48:29Conclusion
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