[Baypiggies] November talk?

[Shannon -jj Behrens]

On 10/27/07, Alec Flett <alecf at flett.org> wrote:
> Here's an idea: a roundtable on concurrency. Rather than trying to do a
> single, monolithic top-to-bottom of every approach, we cover the basics and
> then delve into a more interactive session where people discuss specific
> issues that they care about.
>
> I personally think we could have one person do a handwavy talk for 30-40
> minutes about the 3-4 major Python concurrency approaches:
> - forking - basic process behavior, IPC approaches
> - basic threading - what's a thread, what's a lock
> - async I/O - how it works, scheduling issues
> - stackless - what is it, what's a channel?
>
> Leaving coroutines and erlang as being too advanced for the average person
> interested in Python concurrency...

Looks like we agree.

> Then, you have some "experts" (maybe one per pattern) sit and have a
> discussion in front of the rest of the group for an hour or two.
>
> I think I'd be willing to even be the dummy who handwaves about these 4
> approaches if I could find 4 willing experts to correct my naive
> simplifications in a constructive way, through the roundtable discussion. I
> am by NO means an expert in any of these areas but I understand the concepts
> well enough, and have dabbled just enough in each of them to get myself in
> trouble. As a bonus, I think I have a guy who would be willing to claim some
> expertise in Stackless.

Libor and I are both experts in stackless.  In fact, egroups,
IronPort, Slide, and the open source version of stackless all came
from the same lineage.

> Here's the catch: I just can't justify the time commitment (to myself or my
> family) to truck down to Mountain View from Berkeley without a car, and
> without living near BART! (I don't know how jj does it from his place, if he
> does!)

I volunteer a ride ;)  (925) 209-6439.

> If there is no SF-based venue that people usually use, I can probably offer
> up space at my company (Metaweb) at Montgomery & Howard in SF (near the
> Montgomery BART and Transbay terminal) - This doesn't have to be one of the
> monthly BayPiggies meetings, just a one-off SF-based meeting with a specific
> focus.

Since I can give you a ride, I think it's best to have it at google.
Everyone knows where it is, and I think it's a pretty good venue.

> Is this something people would be interested in?

Yep.

Drew, can you give a 10 minute overview of how Twisted uses callbacks
and continuation passing style on top of select, etc.?

Maybe it's just because I'm a Web guy, but I think it's helpful to
give the talk from the point of view of someone writing a Web server.
That's something that's well known and understood.  Hence, we
shouldn't cover Twisted's Web server implementation, but rather how
you would implement a Web server in Twisted vs. how you would
implement it with threads.

Best Regards,
-jj

-- 
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