Asynchronous events, programming, and real life

I saw this really great article about how Starbucks is a good model of asynchronous activities.

Its a really good correlation between programing and a “real-life” activity that I’ve seen recently. A lot of topics in computer science and programming are difficult to talk about with people outside of the industry (i.e. my wife gets bored if I talk shop). But at the same time, there’s a lot of parallels between real life and programming, it just finding the good examples that is hard to do.

Parallel processing is another one of those topics. Its one of those things that if you understand the principals of it, you will see examples of it in day-to-day life all the time. When doing laundry, you don’t wait for one load to completely dry before starting the next, you start the next load in the wash as soon as the first one is out! When making a lot of sandwiches, it is better to work in an assembly line fashion where one person puts on the mayo, another adds the meat, someone does the mustard, and someone puts the cheese on. In some cases, splitting up the job up lets you get it done faster. Its interesting that these real world events can be be modeled/explained with the mathematics of programming.