events
tiny rumors. they arrive in small batches and they always think they came first. each carries a timestamp it cannot be trusted to have set honestly.
hello, tired engineer.
complet&ngine
a quarterly zine about concurrency, contention, and the small acts of bookkeeping that hold distributed worlds together.
turn the page
what this engine is for
time
the chaperone. it does not promise order, only that two clocks, asked nicely, will eventually agree to disagree on the same things.
workers
the patient ones. they pull, they hold, they release. they remember every promise and very little else. they take naps when the queue is kind.
when an event meets time inside a worker, something witnessed becomes something recorded — and that small recording is the entire reason this engine exists.
the story of one event
scroll. follow the bright thing.
the timeline it settles into
the resource it contends for
the worker that picks it up
the queue it joins
a field guide to contention
imagine you are an event.
you have arrived. you carry a small payload — three fields, a timestamp, a hopeful promise. you wait in a soft-lit corridor. somewhere, beyond your line of sight, a door opens, and a worker glances up. you are seen. you are not yet chosen.
this is what contention feels like from the inside: a polite, breathless waiting. it does not feel like a graph going up. it feels like being almost-noticed, over and over, by a system that means well.
some of your neighbors in the queue will be picked first because they are older. some because they are louder. some because the worker has already promised something to their friend. you will learn to spot the species. they have habits.
→ this little bestiary, then, is for you.
what determinism looks like
two runs, the same seed, the same story. press play on either; both move.
run A · seed 000000
run B · seed 000000
dear reader,
i have been thinking about concurrency for a long time, and i have come to believe it is a kind of kindness. it is the practice of running many small intentions in the same room without anybody having to apologize.
most engines are written for performance. that is good. performance is dignity at scale. but i wanted to write one that was also narrative — one that, when something went wrong at three in the morning, could tell you a true story about what happened. not a graph. a story.
so this is what completengine is. it is a runtime that takes events and time and patient workers, and it remembers the story of every contention, every retry, every quiet success. it does not yell at you. it leaves a small letter on the table. like this one.
if you have read this far, you and i probably believe a lot of the same things about software. i hope the rest of the zine is useful. i hope the engine is, too. i hope you sleep tonight.
with care, and with a small amount of awe at what computers will tolerate from us,
— the author
issue 01 · spring
where to go next
three balloons. three doorways. pick whichever feels right.
read the model
try the sandbox
view the source
completengine — issue 01. set in bagel fat one, monoton, fraunces, dm sans, caveat. printed in deep ink-violet. no cookies were harmed.