Sometimes people ask me what I do for a living. Usually I tend to pause and think, real hard, becuase the people asking me this aren’t programmers. They use computers, but are mostly limited to a Windows machine, writing in MS Word and browsing the Internet, mostly for Facebook.

I often start off with: “It’s a bit complicated to explain … “, by which time I’ve lost most of the people in the room listening to me. Sometimes I say: “I’m a software architect.”, because people seem to know what architects do for a living, they draw houses, design stuff and drive SAAB’s. Much like dentists. The prefix “software” however does confuse people.

Don’t try this at home kids. (Disclaimer: I live in Sweden :)

This is a rant about something I recently found to be a long standing battle line in the world of programming, Lau78. The event vs thread based approach to programming. As rants go I do not aspire to deliver a clear or logical message, what so ever. It’s basically just something I need to get off my chest.

It was not until 2007 I first learned about the event based approach to programming and event libraries like libevent and libev. Up until that point the silver bullet everyone was using was … Threads.