March 11, 2020

Mike Perham on Sustaining Open Source with Sidekiq and Faktory

Episode 88 // The EmberMap Podcast

Mike Perham joins Sam and Ryan to talk about Sidekiq, his popular background job library for Ruby developers, and his new project Faktory which brings the same capabilities to developers working in any language including JavaScript. He also talks about the business he's formed around his projects which provides his main source of income and has sustained his open source development for more than 10 years.

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Show notes

Topics include:

  • 0:00 - What is Faktory?
  • 2:28 – Why might I need a background job?
  • 13:26 – Why did you make Sidekiq?
  • 16:15 – What lead to Faktory?
  • 24:02 – Why'd you use Go to implement Faktory's server?
  • 25:36 – Who is Faktory for?
  • 31:58 – What's the most interesting thing you've learned about architecting background job systems?
  • 36:24 – How do you see job queuing work in a serverless world?
  • 41:23 – What are some of your thoughts on open source sustainability?
  • 46:48 – What makes a library productizable?
  • 48:30 – Were you thinking entrepreneurially when starting Sidekiq?
  • 53:30 – Could open source sustainability be solved by a marketplace or middleman?
  • 55:14 – How has your business model and financial incentives affected the development of your open source libraries?
  • 1:00:30 – How do you think about API additions and feature requests to Sidekiq?

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