Food Trucks and Async Programming

A few days ago, we had “Food Truck Day” at DealerOn. Say Cheese, a grilled cheese food truck set up shop out front of our Rockville office and word spread quickly. As a line formed, one person in the back of the truck took orders, and two cooks worked the griddle. When an order was received, they used a queue of “tickets” to track orders, and both cooks worked simultaneously to prepare a variety of grilled cheeses. For such a confined space, the system was efficient and well-orchestrated. It struck me that this was a perfect example of an asynchronous and parallel system architecture. We’ll look at some concepts of async, parallel, and distributed programming using a hypothetical food truck as an example.

Synchronous

Imagine a food truck with only a single cook who serves burgers. The line forms and they take your order, put the patty on the grill, sit by the grill waiting for it to cook, add a bun and toppings, and serve it. Then they take the order from the next customer and repeat the same process. While this is the simplest setup, it has obvious inefficiencies. Both the cook and the customer spend a lot of time standing around idle while their food is being cooked and the cook can only cook one patty at a time. Taking an order takes some time, so the grill sits empty for a few minutes between each order. However, this is how we write most code. It…