I've used Python's asyncio a couple times now, but never really felt confident in my mental model of how it fundamentally works and therefore how I can best leverage it. The official docs provide decent documentation for each specific function in the package, but, in my opinion, lack a cohesive overview of the systems design and architecture. Something that could help the user understand the why and how behind the recommended patterns. And a way to help the user make informed decisions about which tool in the asyncio toolkit they ought to grab, or to recognize when asyncio is the entirely wrong toolkit. This is my attempt to fill that gap.

This is excellent. Thanks.

Great read!

Python asyncio can really screw up your runtime performance if you use it poorly. And it's _really_ easy to use poorly.

Consider a FastAPI server using asyncio instead of threading. _Any_ time you drop down into a synchrononous API, you better be sure that you're not doing anything slow. For example, encoding or decoding JSON in Python actually grabs the GIL depending on what library you're using, and then you have no hope of releasing control back to asyncio.

[About the event loop]

> She's behind the scenes managing resources. Some power is explicitly granted to her, but a lot of her ability to get things done comes from the respect & cooperation of her subordinates.

What a wonderful paragraph. Playful, yet with a deep meaning. It makes the article a joy to read.

Awesome job closing a gap in the asyncio docs - wonder if it could be contributed back & be added!

This is great! Thanks for writing it.

One nit, the unquoted quotes in this file seem to be a parse error (I replaced the inner ones with single quotes and it ran) https://github.com/anordin95/a-conceptual-overview-of-asynci...

> Frankly, I'm not sure why that design decision was made and find it rather confuses the meaning of await: asynchronously wait.

I've always understood it to mean "wait for asynchronous object", not that the wait itself is asynchronous. It's just an English word that roughly means "wait for", that was chosen for the nice "a" prefix for asynchronous stuff.