Learn & Hack

Josh Suereth will give a talk on asynchronous programming (more info below), and then we'll spend some time hacking on a group project to be determined. I'm going to send out a poll regarding what project we might want to work in together.

Functional Patterns for the Asynchronous Web - Josh Suereth

Asynchronous programming is the latest hype for web development. Why block a thread on a database query when the CPU could be looking at the next one? While Asynchronous programming can help improve total throughput on a mult-core machine, the current state of the art lacks common patterns for how to define asynchronous flow.

This talk covers those patterns, from joining together a series of asynchronous operations to chaining a pipeline of asynchronous tasks. We’ll present a few core abstractions from functional programming that help define asynchronous workflow. Finally, using these same abstractions, we’ll show how to write unit tests that run synchronously using the same code as the asynchronous workflow.