Ryan Harrison

(Software Engineer at Google), U of S Computer Science Graduate (B.Sc. 2009; M.Sc. 2015)

``Within a modern computing context, unless you are working on embedded controllers and other low level hardware, concurrency is a fact of life. All modern computing systems support multiple threads of control, so large scale systems reduce the complexity of individual components by making them their own processes and pushing the complexity into the communication mechanism. Unless you are a niche programmer, a lack of understanding of the foundations of concurrent programming will slow and eventually stall a career in Computer Science. For professional work that I have done, if the project was not working with a legacy system I have had to be aware of concurrency issues in what I was designing. The foundations in concurrency, as its name suggests, provides you with a strong foundation in concurrency which allows you to easily adapt to new jobs and projects in modern computing.’’