One day a coworker mentioned that he was thinking about APIs for distributed compute clusters and I jokingly responded “clearly the ideal API would be simply calling telefork() and your process wakes up on every machine of the cluster with the return value being the instance ID”. I ended up captivated by this idea: I couldn’t get over how it was clearly silly, yet way easier than any remote job API I’d seen, and also seemingly not a thing computers could do. I also kind of knew how I could do it, and I already had a good name which is the hardest part of any project, so I got to work.
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