Open Source Bridge

At MongoDB we write open source database drivers in ten programming languages. Ideally, all behave the same. We also help developers in the MongoDB community replicate our libraries’ behavior in even more (and more exotic) languages. How can we herd these cats along the same track? For years we failed, but we’ve recently gained momentum on standardizing our libraries. Testable, machine-readable specs prove which code conforms and which does not.

Asynchronous I/O frameworks like Node, Twisted, Tornado, and Python 3.4’s new “asyncio” can efficiently scale past tens of thousands of concurrent connections. But async coding with callbacks is painful and error-prone. Programmers increasingly use coroutines in place of callbacks to get the best of both worlds: efficiency plus a natural and robust coding style. I’ll explain how asyncio’s coroutines work. They are built using Python generators, the “yield from” statement, and the Future and Task classes. You will gain a deep understanding of this miraculous new programming idiom in the Python standard library.

As a member of the open source community, do you contribute only code, or also words? Writing about programming benefits yourself and others. This talk outlines solid article structures, suggests topics to write about, explains how blogging about programming is special, and inspires you to write articles of enduring value.