Azure & DevOps Podcast

Jeremy Miller: Parallelism in Software - Episode 261

Sep 4, 2023

Experienced software architect and consultant Jeremy Miller discusses open-source development, Marten, and parallelism in software. He shares insights on implementing the producer-consumer pattern, TPL Dataflow Library, and document databases. The chapter concludes with a discussion on reference implementations, IOC containers, and promotions of related products and consulting services.

36:29

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Episode guests

Jeremy Miller

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Episode notes

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Quick takeaways

Parallelism in software development can optimize performance and handle shared state in distributed systems.

Understanding IOC containers and gradually exploring more advanced features can simplify code and improve diagnostics in software development.

Deep dives

Parallelism and Software: Using Martin and Wolverine

Jeremy Miller, a software architect and developer, discusses the benefits and implementation of parallelism in software development. He emphasizes the importance of understanding concurrency and shared state when working on distributed systems. Miller highlights the use of the producer-consumer pattern and explains how it can be implemented using libraries such as TPL Data Flow. He also introduces Martin and Wolverine, tools he has developed for event sourcing and CQS architecture. Miller advises developers to start with the built-in IOC container and gradually explore more advanced features as needed.

Introduction

2min

Lessons from Working with Experts and Tools

7min

Currency and Parallelism in Software Development

5min

Understanding the Concept of Martin and its Applications

2min

Parallelism in Software: Implementing Patterns and Tools

18min

Reminiscing about Movies and Discussing Parallelism

2min

Jeremy Miller started his career as a “real” engineer but wandered into software because that looked like more fun. Since then, Jeremy has worked in and led software development teams in the computer manufacturing industry, finance, insurance, health care, and banking industries. Lately, Jeremy has been focused on leading software architecture teams and helping mentor other software architects. Having had roles both as an in-house software architect and as a software consultant, Jeremy has a great deal of insight into the challenges that confront companies developing and maintaining enterprise systems over time.

Jeremy is well known for his Open-Source Software tools starting with Structure Map and continuing today to Marten and Wolverine. Jeremy is also a frequent author and technical speaker at software conferences. Jeremy recently helped found JasperFx Software to build a sustainable business around the “Critter Stack” tools.

Topics of Discussion:

[6:10] How Jeremy got into open-source development.

[6:50] Being a part of the codebetter.com website in the pre-Twitter days.

[9:30] What most developers should be aware of in the space of getting code to run or multiple instances to run at the same time and having it come out well.

[12:04] What is Marten, and how does it work?

[12:26] TPL Dataflow Library is a hidden gem inside of Microsoft.

[15:25] The two parts of Marten and how they work together.

[17:42] What is a producer-consumer pattern?

[20:05] How to implement a queue pattern.

[24:04] You should probably have some basic understanding of one level underneath you, but Jeremy thinks you don’t want to work on the thread level yourself.

[25:38] Jeremy defines “Critter Stack.”

[29:55] Jeremy’s advice for new developers.

[32:59] Jeremy talks about the type of customers he is looking to collaborate with.

Mentioned in this Episodes:

Clear Measure Way

Architect Forum

Software Engineer Forum

Programming with Palermo — New Video Podcast! Email us programming@palermo.net

Clear Measure, Inc. (Sponsor)

.NET DevOps for Azure: A Developer’s Guide to DevOps Architecture the Right Way, by Jeffrey Palermo — Available on Amazon!

Jeffrey Palermo’s Twitter — Follow to stay informed about future events!

Architect Tips — Video podcast!