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> If I want to use NOTIFY in postgres? I googled "SQLALchemy notify listen postgres" and I find a few unanswered stackoverflow questions and a github gist that has some code but no context.

Author here. I would say that my post is less targeted at someone like you (application developer, presumably) and more targeted at library developers.

I don't think it's ideal for everyone to be implementing bespoke, Postgres-backend (or any other queue for that matter) background job workers in their applications. There's a lot of nuance and implementation details to get wrong with background jobs, and for that reason I think background work should generally be done by more comprehensive, dedicated libraries or frameworks.

If every Rails application didn't have Sidekiq/Active Jobs and instead had bespoke background worker implementations, Rails applications would likely have a much less rosy reputation on account of their unreliability.




Thank you for writing this.

I love the article's point, and I tend to feel that the "chasing the cargo cult of 'scale'" is maybe the biggest problem I see in development teams today. It is certainly the biggest problem that I rarely hear anybody talking about.

    Author here. I would say that my post is less 
    targeted at someone like you (application developer, 
    presumably) and more targeted at library developers.
I think the article might benefit from clarification on this point.

Reading the HN comments, I see that I'm not the only person who came away with a misunderstanding there.

Again, I 100% love the overall point.


Yep, fair critique. Glad you enjoyed it.




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