In this episode of Elixir Mix the panel interviews Parker Selbert. Parker lives in Chicago and runs a consultancy with his wife. He joins the panel to discuss a library that he wrote, Oban. Parker starts by explaining what Oban is and why he wrote it. Oban is a way to run reliable background jobs by persisting them in the database.

Oban is akin to Sidekick, Parker explains, he wanted something similar to Sidekick for Elixir. He made a few improvements including moving it to Postgres from Redis. He shares the common problems found using Redis and how easy Postgres was to use for this library. 

The panel asks Parker about his Oban Recipes. Parker explains why he wrote the recipes and what some of them contain. After releasing Oban he received many questions asking about how to use Oban. Parker took the most common questions and wrote 7 blog post outlining how to use Oban. 

Parker shares his favorite features found in Oban and walks the panel through its architecture. The panel asks him about the maturity and usage of the library. Parker tells them that the usage has been steadily climbing. The episode ends with the panel discussing the Oban UI and how it works.  

Panelists


Mark Ericksen




Josh Adams




Eric Oestrich


Guest


Parker Selbert


Sponsors


Sentry– use the code “devchat” for two months free on Sentry’s small plan




ElixirCasts | Get 10% off with the promo code "elixirmix"




CacheFly


Links


https://github.com/sorentwo/oban




https://oban.dev/




Oban Recipes Part 1: Unique Jobs




Oban Recipes Part 2: Recursive Jobs




Oban Recipes Part 3: Reliable Scheduling




Oban Recipes Part 4: Reporting Progress




Oban Recipes Part 5: Batch Jobs




Oban Recipes Part 6: Expected Failures




Oban Recipes Part 7: Splitting Queues




Oban — Reliable and Observable Job Processing




Oban UI: Private Beta




Github Starts Won’t Pay Your Rent




https://twitter.com/sorentwo?lang=en




Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: A Pragmatic Guide to Learning Programming Languages 




https://github.com/sorentwo/kiq 




https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-notify.html 




https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-listen.html 




https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.5/sql-select.html 




https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/explicit-locking.html 




https://github.com/sorentwo/oban/blob/master/lib/oban/pruner.ex 




https://github.com/elixirs/faker 




https://oban.dev/#sign-up 




https://www.facebook.com/Elixir-Mix 




https://twitter.com/elixir_mix


Picks

Mark Ericksen:


https://twitter.com/CodeWisdom/status/1189602991701184512 


Josh Adams:


How to write a commit message


Eric Oestrich:


Godzilla: The Showa-Era Films, 1954–1975 


Parker Selbert:


The Rust Programming Language




Copper Fox Distillery

Twitter Mentions