Grasping the "no shared state" guideline was a big step forward for me in learning how to write safer concurrent code. My earliest attempts at writing multi-threaded code in the late 90s used thread pool approaches. One of Java's big selling points when it was new in late 90s was threading support. Somehow pools of worker threads executing the same code, often with each thread blocking synchronously when handling an HTTP request, seemed to become the dominant paradigm. Different threads executing the same logic inevitably leads to the dread shared mutable state, and deadlocks and races. Enter Sam Rushing's Medusa circa 2001/2, which made a virtue out of the necessity of Python's GIL. Coding single threaded async non blocking code in a callback style is paradigm shift in terms of decomposing a problem. Once that shift is made the big gain is avoiding shared mutable state. Now, when I code multi-threaded C++ server code I ensure that there is no logic or code shared between the threads. Threads communicate using locking producer consumer queues with well defined copy semantics. The result is no deadlocks and far fewer races.