pg-boss getting started guide / examples

[brannan]

I've been programming on and off for a long time but somehow have never taken a deep dive into task queues. I did have one project that made extensive use of RabbitMQ, but I didn't do much of the work on that. So when it comes to pg-boss and task queues, I'm an idiot. I get the idea, certainly, but when to use send, publish, schedule took a little thought and digging around. Maybe this is the best way.

Your API docs are good, but but they miss the bigger picture for somebody who knows they need a task-queue but don't know the background theory and queuing terminology. For instance, "I want to offload the sending of messages to a queue. The messages will need to be sent at one specific time and date. Considerations and how to proceed?"

Anyway, I've dug through the docs, read a number of the discussions, and implemented the solution that I think I need. Well, it may not be best or even right, but it does work.

So I wrote a little "lay programmers guide to pg-boss" for my current project to document my understand of pg-boss. It's all of 57 lines long.

Would this be of any benefit to the project? Somebody who knows more than I do will have to review it. And clearly this is not a barn burner of an issue.

Perhaps just pulling a few more examples into the first readme would be a good idea. I'm happy to take a shot at this if anybody thinks it would be useful.

[timgit]

I agree with you that the Intro section of the docs is not a holistic intro to job queues, but rather how to use the npm package. This could definitely be improved.

I'd prefer to keep this very small, however, and maybe link to someone else's intro, perhaps something in the AWS SQS docs since I reference that on other places. Something that mentions asynchronicity, persistence, retries, and idempotency would be a good start.