bonobo3000

Hello,

I've been interested in concurrency for a while now and I've been picking up bits and pieces by stumbling across great posts/videos once in a while or working with them at my job. So far I'm sort of comfortable with threads (not the gory JVM details though) and Akka, and a tiny bit of futures/promises and co-operative concurrency type stuff with pythons tornado.

I want to go deeper, really grok all the different models and be able to make informed decisions about which model us appropriate when, understand how they map to lower levels, generally gain a comprehensive understanding. I'm currently going through Java Concurrency in Practice.

My question - what resources will help me get a comprehensive understanding of concurrency & parallelism? what toy project would you recommend where i can implement the same thing with lots of different models to understand the difference?

Thanks in advance!

I've recently become really interested in the details of programming languages, type systems, optimizations and compilers in general. Seems like a fascinating subject, with a lot of depth. I'm looking to move to a different job soon and want to work on something like that. I have some questions for the wise folks of HN:

What kinds of companies or specific companies need programmers working in this area?

Is it possible to break into the field without much prior experience (also I am a junior dev)? I'm working on a lisp interpreter and have read a bunch about compilers but don't have much experience. Honestly i'm confident i can pick up whatever i need to learn and will put in time, but that doesn't count for much in an interview.

I have recently started working at a company with a massive python codebase. I'm finding it really hard to understand what is going on because of the lack of types. I don't know what the arguments to functions are supposed to be or what they are returning, and because its a fairly sophisticated, large microservice architecture it is even harder to trace things across services.

My experience before this was working on a much smaller Java codebase - it was written well and really easy to understand. The fact that we didn't really have much tooling was a huge help to me too - so when I deployed a service for example, I could see the shell commands and its basically a "mvn package; scp ...; start ...". When i wanted to know where the logs go, I look at a log4j config in the project. When i want to know whats running, I ssh in and "ps aux | grep x" - there are maybe 10 servers tops for a project.

This is a much bigger company with hundreds of services, lots of machines, complex deploy procedures and in general just much more abstraction both in codebase and ops. My normal approach is to just dig deeper and peel back the abstractions until I see whats happening. I fear thats impossible here. Instead, we ask someone who built it or look at an outdated wiki, which is great but just so much more painful than actually knowing how everything fits together.

I am kind of lost as to where to even start understanding this codebase. The 3 main challenges being 1. no type information, 2. massive codebase, 3. ops complexity. What are your tips for getting to grips with this whole system? Any advice is welcome.