Effectively Using Future in Perl

I’ve been working a lot with the Future library and IO::Async in Perl recently.  There was a bug in our memcache/dynamo proxy, so I ended up doing a lot of investigation about Futures in order to simulate the bug and verify the fix.  So, I want to talk about how Futures work and why it was so difficult for me.

PHP 7.2 exposed our bad code

We upgraded to PHP 7.2, and then something horrible happened.

A “thanks for submitting client $x!” message was distributed not only to the agent who did the submission, but to all agents registered in the system.  A lot of drama ensued as confused messages started coming in, and the account rep forwarded the message to basically everyone in the company saying “what happened!?”

We stared at the code, but it was so simple that it couldn’t possibly be wrong, and besides, it hadn’t changed in months.  But the switch over from PHP 7.1 to 7.2 had happened mere hours before this event.