Asynchronous vs Synchronous, an internal code camp
You would be forgiven to think that an internal code camp is an event where the back-end team gets to teach the rest of the office about code they have been writing, and you are.
This is completely different, so different that I would term it as an evaluation. You see, the whole office is already well versed in this area, but the back-end team… well not that much.
You see a couple of weeks prior to this, back-end guys were working on a project to refactor its code and for this reason, the words asynchronous and synchronous were being thrown around carelessly. In fact so carelessly that the whole office decided to have a sit-down and have the back-end people explain the term to us. Erm... Just so we can verify they knew what they were talking about.
First goes Peter, he goes on with huge programming jargon, pausing in between his presentation to take huge bites off his pizza. Quick glance around the room and you could tell that the whole team is at par. Daniel who already has 100 years of experience in this area, shakes his head gently in agreement with whatever Peter was teaching. For some reason, Peter is still not convinced that we understand him so he calls in the other big gun.
Enters the big man Eric with his big tools a marker pen and the whiteboard.
Eric takes it a notch higher, discussing the actual implementation, this guy is literary writing c# on a whiteboard. Half way through his presentation and the only thing I’ve jotted down is Peter has 4 oranges, the distance to town is 20 km, what is the mass of the sun?
Seeing that the whole office is not in approval of his amateurish presentation, he asks for help from an even bigger gun. The stakes have never been this high, the whole back-end team could not deliver on such a simple task. They quickly got together for a crisis meeting and...
Comes in Hash with his mobile phone analogy, this analogy is ISO 2008 certified and is even rumored to be an entry exam evaluation into Harvard. “Industry experts use this all the time,” he says before asking us to hand in all our phones, he then proceeds to give them back one by one. Then he asks for the phones again and requests everyone to come for their phones at once. And that ladies and gentlemen is the difference between asynchronous and synchronous requests. He moonwalks into the sunset while MJ’s thriller is playing in the background.