Sean T. Allen on Behaviour-Oriented Concurrency

​Main: Sean T. Allen on "When Concurrency Matters: Behaviour-Oriented Concurrency"

​Abstract: Expressing parallelism and coordination is central for modern concurrent programming. Many mechanisms exist for expressing both parallelism and coordination. However, the design decisions for these two mechanisms are tightly intertwined...We address this pain point by introducing a new concurrency paradigm: Behaviour-Oriented Concurrency (BoC). In BoC, we are revisiting the fundamental concept of a behaviour to provide a more transactional concurrency model. BoC enables asynchronously creating atomic and ordered units of work with exclusive access to a collection of independent resources.

​Bio: Sean T. Allen is constitutionally incapable of accepting that you must choose between going fast and staying safe - a stubbornness that landed him on the Pony core team and keeps him explaining, to anyone who'll hold still, precisely how their threads betrayed them. By day he's an Engineer at Antithesis, hunting the concurrency bugs that only surface at 3am. He has been Reviewer #2, and he is not sorry.

​Mini: Akshay Shah on "Simple Testing Can Prevent Most Critical Failures: An Analysis of Production Failures in Distributed Data-Intensive Systems"

​Abstract: Large, production quality distributed systems still fail periodically, and do so sometimes catastrophically, where most or all users experience an outage or data loss. We present the result of a comprehensive study investigating 198 randomly selected, user-reported failures...We found the majority of catastrophic failures could easily have been prevented by performing simple testing on error handling code – the last line of defense – even without an understanding of the software design.

​Bio: Akshay is the Field CTO at Antithesis, a testing platform to help agents produce bug-free code. In the past, he’s been an infra and platform engineer at Uber, Microsoft, other people’s silly startups, and his own silly startup. Apart from computers, he likes bicycles and coffee.