S2 · E8 · 2024
The One With the Pull Requests
Ida publishes forty lines of code on a Sunday. By Friday, strangers in nine countries are sending her improvements, and postcards.
Client: Open source · Open source
Previously on…
Every project Ida built needed a few background jobs, and every queue she found wanted its own server. So she wrote a tiny one that keeps jobs in the Postgres you already have, and put it online.
The episode
Cold open. Sunday evening. Ida pushes forty lines of code and goes to bed. Her phone buzzes all night. Roll titles.
Act one
A job is a row in a table. Workers claim rows with FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED, so two never take the same job, and an unfinished job goes back in the queue. No broker, no dashboard to keep alive.
Act two
The library has one rule: it must fit in 4 kB. Every feature request is weighed against it, which has made for better features and a lot of polite no’s.
The tag
A contributor in Lisbon organised the rooftop meetup. The cat was not invited and came anyway, in a backpack.
Scenes
The postcards started arriving in week three. The cat claimed every box.
How it ended
- Size, minified and gzipped
- After: 4 kB
- Stars on GitHub
- After: 2,400
- Countries of contributors
- After: 23
Crew
- TypeScript
- PostgreSQL
- GitHub Actions
