pselbert

> I wonder what makes Sidekiq special?

Time, know-how, and long term dedication are the key ingredients from my perspective. Maybe he's working 10-20 hours now, but there's support and development every day for the past 11 years.

> I don't imagine any equivalent product (background job processing) in the other languages is raking in that much, if making any revenue in the first place.

I guarantee, there are background job processors in other languages making revenue.

Jobs may crash due to VM issues or OOM problems. The more common cause of "orphans" is when the VM restarts and jobs can't finish during the shutdown period.

That thread says the opposite at the end. The ban they were referring to was over a decade prior.

Ericsson has a dedicated team that maintains and actively improves Erlang with new features and capabilities.

How in the world does DocuSign have 7k employees? I’m genuinely baffled. 700 employee would seem like a stretch.

There are ample Elixir jobs out there, and lots of companies hiring.

For a quick check of relative popularity, open the past couple monthly “Who’s Hiring” here and search for “Elixir.” The community is thriving and growing.

For many accounts the audit log isn’t going to show some crucial information—git activity. Clone events are only available through the REST API for Enterprise customers.

The only reason I’m able to maintain a reasonably successful open source library is because it is part of an open core business model. Without that I couldn’t justify the development effort or relentless support to myself, or my family. Getting a few hundred dollars a month wouldn’t cut it either.

Building a business on a stack of other people’s hobbies isn’t sustainable. I mean, just tell that to anybody outside of tech and watch their reaction.

One of the best parts of listening to Elixir Outlaws, the podcast that Chris co-hosts, is disagreeing with his wacky and strongly-held opinions on things. Personally, I don't agree with most of what he's calling out here, but it's still a great read to get you thinking.

Running 75 million jobs a year would be totally fine. Depending on the configuration and load Oban easily runs thousands of jobs a second, and 75 million breaks down to less than 3 a second.

I’d argue it’s worth the switch, but I’m highly biased!

The size of Alpine and its package manager are brilliant. What gets me, and my team, is the support policy for “older” packages.

For a while we would pin library versions (e.g. libvips) only to have the pin break the build because the package was no longer provided. That’s only a few months later, not years. It seriously impacts the repeatability of Docker builds.

Now we don’t pin to the same extent and lack some confidence, but at least it doesn’t break the build.

Couldn't help but think of:

Brian Called Brian: You don't need to follow me! You don't need to follow anybody! You got to think for yourselves! You're all individuals! You're all different!

Man: I'm not...

There isn't an issue with Kafka and Elixir, it's the inherent complication around using Kafka when a lighter weight solution (Rabbit, PG) would work perfectly fine.

José is an enormous asset to the community and has an influence on many of the marquee projects, but it definitely isn't single-handedly done. He cares about the ecosystem and is very generous with his time and attention.

Anecdotally speaking, he hasn't been hands on with Oban[1], yet he still offers advice and guidance around the project because it is in the Elixir community.

1: https://github.com/sorentwo/oban

That project is fantastic! I'll soon have need for some clean SVG language icons and these are perfect.

According to the recent Thinking Elixir podcast [0] the performance is comparable. They specifically cite the performance of dialyzer, which typically runs through HiPE, as being just as fast with the new JIT.

From what I recall HiPE isn't widely used and will be (may be?) removed.

[0]: https://thinkingelixir.com/podcast-episodes/017-jit-compiler...

No idea. It is the foundation of VSCode and most of the other plugin systems powered by the language server standard.

The IDE type tooling is getting better all the time thanks to Elixir-LS. There was a 0.6 release a couple of days ago with a ton of improvements [0]. Better auto-completion triggers and Ecto completion come to mind as huge quality of life improvements.

0: https://github.com/elixir-lsp/elixir-ls/blob/master/CHANGELO...

A lot of people have been moving from Exq to Oban. Come by the #oban channel on Slack if you have any questions.

Rolling your own tools is an irreplaceable way to learn things thoroughly.

That said, HN readers from outside the Elixir should know there are great libraries for all of those use cases. Point in case is background job processors—we have plenty of options, though I’m especially fond of Oban[0] (full disclosure, I’m the author).

[0] https://github.com/sorentwo/oban

Anecdotally I don’t believe dual licensing is viable for smaller projects. There simply aren’t enough companies that care about your license to make it a reliable business model.

This is something I explored initially for Oban[0] and I interviewed a few successful OSS product owners. They attributed zero sales to licensing. All sales were driven by features that a business needed once they had already invested in the core project.

[0] https://getoban.pro

You make an excellent point here—it takes a lot of effort to get a solo project (OSS or otherwise) to be profitable enough that can compete with a day job’s salary. As somebody that is monetizing OSS, making a supplanting my salary is my measurement of success. At that point I can focus on my product and my customers during core working hours.

If your database based queue is introducing lock contention then it is doing things wrong. Since Postgres 9.6 there is `FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED` which completely eliminates the issue.