Peter Mbanugo caught our eye by tweeting (X-ing?) his experiments with Seastar (the C++ framework behind ScyllaDB) and its thread-per-core architecture. A few exchanges (and a little convincing) later, we can finally introduce the P99 CONF community to Peter and his work on achieving massive, multi-core concurrency with pure state machines.
Note: P99 CONF is a technical conference on performance and low-latency engineering. It’s virtual, free, and highly interactive. This year’s agenda spans Rust, Tokio, Zig, C++, Go, eBPF, observability, io_uring, kernel, distributed systems, and of course AI/ML.
We hope you’ll join us live on October 21-22 to hear the talk and chat with Peter. In the meantime, let’s get to know more about him!
How do you answer the dreaded “tell us about yourself” question?
Put simply, I’m a dad, a husband, a programmer, a writer, and whatever else I find myself doing in the near future. I’ve done various things over the years that it is hard to answer such question about myself :). Before I became a father, I used to teach dance classes (Kizomba and Salsa) and go to dance festivals as a taxi dancer. Since becoming a father, I’ve reduced a lot of what I used to do, and they now mostly revolve around parenting and family time, programming and writing, and doing a lot more reading than in the past.
I started freelancing/consulting last year and my programming interest since then have been heavy on performance, concurrency, and any related topic related to those two. That has taken me to starting (and stopping) a podcast on web performance, learning about things I used to consider less important or never knew about. Things like data-oriented design, the various factors affecting performance, more about networking, and concurrency. I’ve got a large growing list of articles and books I plan to read, but I’m afraid I won’t ever catch up to the end of that list.
So if you need help on such areas in your project, do reach out. I’m also happy to just chat about those topics if we share a similar interest.
What’s the most interesting project that you’re working on right now – or hoping to start soon?
It’s a concurrency framework called TINA. It’s a project that I’m combining some of the interesting things I find in various projects like Erlang, Seastar (by ScyllaDB), LMAX Disruptor, and a few other projects or past experience. My goal is to make concurrency easy to reason about and program, while making it safe, fast, and efficient. There are other projects I find interesting to build, but I realised I’d need to have a concurrency framework/library since I plan to build them on a non-GC language like Zig.
So TINA is the first step to other things I have in mind, but it’s currently the most interesting for me ATM — besides working on being the best Dad ever 🙃
What will you be talking about at P99 CONF?
I’ll be talking about programming concurrent systems in a simple way. It might be a slight diss at async/await as a primitve, but also talk about some of the ideas in my concurrency project – TINA
What other P99 CONF talks are you most looking forward to – and why?
I see Daniel Lemire has a talk, that’s definitely on my list. He’s doing amazing work. I learn from reading some of his posts, although some are not fully settled in my brain. I do read them anyway because there’s usually something to take away, even if it’s from the referenced material. I’m also looking forward to:
- The Difficult Life of an I/O Request by Avi Kivity
- Building a Real-World 14 GB/sec io_uring + tokio + Arrow + Rust Pipeline by Evan Chan
- How Debugging Nginx Throughput Led to a Linux Kernel Contribution by Daniel Sedlak
- Mo Requests, Mo Problems: Managing Correctness in Asynchronous Systems by Benjamin Cane
I’m curious about Benjamin’s talk because it might be related to some of the pains I’ve experienced with asyncronous/concurrenct systems, some of which I’m making an attempt to solve with TINA. Hopefully it has a good synergy with my talk and I can show the audience that there can be a better way.
What do you like most about P99 CONF?
The talks. Besides some C++ conference talks, I found P99 CONF to be a place I get to learn about performance and the challenges people are solving.
Any performance-related blog/article/paper/book/video recommendations for the P99 CONF community?
I’ll point readers to my blog post, where I wrote about papers, articles, and talks/videos I found valuable. Although I missed it in that blog post, I suggest you watch Sir Tony Hoare, Joe Armstrong, and Carl Hewitt talk about their various concurrency models.
I recommend learning about ZeroMQ, and you can do that by watching some talks from Pieter Hintjens, or reading the ZeroMQ book which is free. If you want to get lost on SIMD and algorithms that work on it, then read the papers from Daniel Lemire.
