Comment by mperham

1 day ago

I wrote Sidekiq, which Oban is based on. Congratulations to Shannon and Parker on shipping this!

I had to make this same decision years ago: do I focus on Ruby or do I bring Sidekiq to other languages? What I realized is that I couldn't be an expert in every language, Sidekiq.js, Sidekiq.py, etc. I decided to go a different direction and built Faktory[0] instead, which flips the architecture and provides a central server which knows how to implement the queue lifecycle internally. The language-specific clients become much simpler and can be maintained by the open source community for each language, e.g. faktory-rs[1]. The drawback is that Faktory is not focused on any one community and it's hard for me to provide idiomatic examples in a given language.

It's a different direction but by focusing on a single community, you may have better outcomes, time will tell!

[0]: https://github.com/contribsys/faktory [1]: https://github.com/jonhoo/faktory-rs

14 comments

mperham

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sorenone  1 day ago

Thanks Mike! You are an inspiration. Parker and I have different strengths both in life and language. We're committed to what this interop brings to both Python and Elixir.

semiquaver  1 day ago

Isn’t it more accurate to say that they are both based on Resque?

enraged_camel  1 day ago

Maybe you didn’t intend it this way, but your comment comes across as an attempt to co-opt the discussion to pitch your own thing. This is generally looked down upon here.

  • mperham  1 day ago

    It was an off-the-cuff comment and probably not worded ideally but the intent was to discuss how Oban is branching off into a new direction for their business based on language-specific products while I went a different direction with Faktory. Since I came to the exact same fork in the road in 2017, I thought it was relevant and an interesting topic on evolving software products.

  • BowBun  1 day ago

    Knowing Mike and his work over the years, that is not the case. He is a man of integrity who owns a cornerstone product in the Ruby world. He is specifically the type of person I want to hear from when folks release new software having to do with background jobs, since he has 15 years of experience building this exact thing.

ai_critic  1 day ago

"based on" is sorta a stretch here.

Sidekiq is pretty bare bones compared to what Oban supports with workflows, crons, partitioning, dependent jobs, failure handling, and so forth.

  • mperham  1 day ago

    By “based on” I don’t mean a shared codebase or features but rather Parker and I exchanged emails a decade ago to discuss business models and open source funding. He initially copied my Sidekiq OSS + Sidekiq Pro business model, with my blessing.

    • sorentwo  1 day ago

      This is absolutely true (except we went OSS + Web initially, Pro came later). You were an inspiration, always helpful in discussion, and definitely paved the way for this business model.