Articles for category: Drive

July 7, 2022

Greg Thomas

Asynchronous Waiting

Asynchronous communication allows for Job A to continue while another Job B happens in parallel.  When Job B has completed, it will let Job A know so that Job A can continue along. The idea is that we are not blocked waiting for Job B to finish and other jobs can carry on while we “wait” for Job B to get done.  At some point Job A will have to wait for Job B to complete, but hopefully, it will not be as bad as if it were a serial operation. Athletes are great at asynchronous operations – when they

July 6, 2022

Greg Thomas

Managing Traffic Hacks

Traffic Management is a very complicated endeavour that we hand over to automated systems to route signals to – very much akin to light posts at a traffic stop. But in the event of a power outage, if you watch people try to manage it themselves you’ll see it gets along “okay” until one person gets frustrated and decides they need to go a bit faster than what you are currently doing to manage the system.  As they do this, other parts of the system (people) view this and start to do the same,  creating points of contention and deadlock

June 29, 2022

Greg Thomas

Tackling Bad Code Performance

You can either tackle a code performance when it happens (i.e., fight the fires) or you can create a plan to tackle it. You will never get away from fighting the fire approach, a scenario, a use case, will always pop up and make you stop and think – “huh, I never thought about that”. But you can look to the other 90% of scenarios that you know of and work through the scenarios that could be better now so that hopefully when those performance fires flare up with a customer, they are not as bad as they could have

June 21, 2022

Greg Thomas

About that Error?

Is it still an error if no one sees it? Of course, it is. But whether it becomes a bug, well that’s up to you, the Developer, to decide how much you care to fix it.