At Shareaholic we make heavy use of Sidekiq for background and asynchronous jobs. Because it uses threads it consumes far fewer resources than its most similar sibling, Resque, which uses a separate process for each job. We are able to run one Sidekiq process with 28 threads for each core on our worker machines. Sidekiq wraps all of its connections in a connection pool using the connection_pool gem as can be seen here. Sidekiq gives the user access to its connections to redis with the Sidekiq.redis method, to which you pass a block and are yielded a connection:

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Sidekiq.redis do |connection|
  # get all the keys in redis
  connection.keys('*')
end

I used to host my blog on Tumblr because that seemed like an easy solution. But starting today I’m moving to Octopress because I actually think it’s even easier to use. Octopress fits better into my blog eriting workflow and appeals to my geeky side because I’m doing all of the hosting/deploying/what-have-you myself.

When I’m developing in Ruby and Rails using RSpec, I have a mapping in my vim configuration for ,l that runs the current test in a separate tmux window. This is incredibly useful for testing early and often and doing TDD to the fullest. So when I started working my dominion app, which uses CoffeeScript and Backbone, I wanted to set up a similar system of quickly being able to run tests. Jasmine is one of the more widely used frameworks for testing JavaScript applications, and is heavily influenced by RSpec:

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describe("A suite", function() {
  it("contains spec with an expectation", function() {
    expect(true).toBe(true);
  });
});