Modern software systems involve many asynchronous tasks, but reporting status on tasks is often handled poorly. An asynchronous task is one that processes in the background and allows the client or caller to work on something else in the meantime (“non-blocking”). Architecturally, asynchronous processing is often the right choice for operations and scaling reasons, but it does add complexity.
Between Honeywell and Qualtrics, I founded a company called ℤ→ℤ Technologies. The first thing I tried was a steganography plug-in for Firefox. The plug-in attempted to hide some text using a user-provided corpus to compute a statistical language model. I documented the early research in emulating tweets. Since that wasn’t fruitful, I pivoted towards an automated statistical analysis service based on the idea of switching the problem from a high-skill process of selecting what processing to do to a low-skill process of searching through the results for something valuable.