Outline

There is a gap in the Ruby ecosystem...

Problem

• there are two patterns that cause silent problems with job queues
• jobs enqueueing jobs and more than 1 side effect in a job
• i call this the Atomicity Gap
• Lost work or Double work

Problem transition to Solution

• build vs. buy
• are you really going to invest the budget for building a workflow framework and not in your product?
• acidic_job, ActiveJob::Continuation
  • (need strong argument against here)
• Temporal and Camunda
  • very heavyweight solutions
  • require lots of new infrastructure
• DBOS, Hatchet, and Oban
  • do not have ruby SDKs

Solution

• durable workflows with Ductwork
• exactly-once step transitions guarantee
• at-least-once step executions made safe with idempotency keys
• reaper cleans up after a crash

Closing

• call-to-action: install LLM agent to evaluate and report where your gaps live in your codebase