TIL: July 28, 2025 - Weekly Reading: Backpressure and Career Advice

Concurrency and Backpressure

• Playground Wisdom: Threads Beat Async/Await – Armin Ronacher

  Armin points out a lot of the ways that async/await are not an ideal way to write concurrent code. Some of the points he makes involve the lack of backpressure handling, halting issues, and an inability to block without tying up the entire control loop.

  I think the issues pointed out here are some of the reasons why I really like Go’s concurrency model. It has a lot of the same issues with halting and backpressure, but does it in an imperative way that is much easier to reason about.

• I’m not feeling the async pressure – Armin Ronacher

  This is Armin’s previous article from 2020 that discusses issues with async/await regarding the inability to control backpressure. One of the main issues is the inability to block without tying up the entire control loop. In Python, calls that would normally block, buffer instead which could lead to memory issues, when applying backpressure by blocking would work better.

• Backpressure explained — the resisted flow of data through software – Jay Phelps

  Linked by Armin’s post from 2020. This is a good introduction to the concept of backpressure in software systems. It covers some of the basic strategies for handling backpressure, such as buffering, throttling, and dropping data. It also covers some architectural patterns like push, pull, and hybrid push/pull architectures.

Career and Impact

• Don’t End The Week With Nothing – Patrick McKenzie

  Patrick talks about how to prioritize projects you work on during your career to maximize your impact over time. Some of the key points are:

  • Choose companies and projects where the work you do is visible to others like OSS or user-facing products. Internal projects aren’t great because other’s can’t see them directly.
  • Work on projects that you can talk about publicly. This helps you build a reputation and network in the industry. Do talks at conferences, etc.
  • Prefer working on things that aren’t tied to your employment. Ideally projects that you can retain some personal ownership. Side hustles and OSS projects that you can continue to work on after you leave the company are good for this.

  I like this advice because it helps build a career over time, that can have compounding returns for you rather than just having money to show for you work at the end.