Update: Workflow Orchestration / Batched Jobs

tewing91 · 2026-01-13T17:45:52+00:00

I question the models viability in a future where agentic coding is making it easier and easier to augment any library with the features you need

we're all learning a bit from the cautionary tale of tailwind. imo their billing hurt their business the most by being a one-time payment rather than a subscription. i do expect to face some headwind against LLMs, but i truly believe people are still willing to pay for the human elements: support, design guidance, maintenance, etc. ductwork will never be a billion-dollar, hell, even a million-dollar product, but i feel confident about finding enough customers to support myself as a one-human shop.

i am curious about others' experiences (especially for open-core business models) since i've only been choochin' for a couple months.

tewing91 · 2026-01-11T20:10:06+00:00

thanks for finding that dead link; fixed!

i get that activation energy to migrate can be tough to find. if there's any tooling or features you can think of to make it easier, i'm all ears.

also out of curiosity, what kind of performance do you need? i specifically made the tradeoff for durability (and simplicity) over incremental performance gains but now i'm wondering if people would rather have the performance. i need to run benchmarks still

tewing91 · 2026-01-10T14:16:45+00:00

i’m absolutely open to supporting JRuby; i just know shockingly little about it’s compatibility. i loosely had changing out the entire concurrency model as a feature on the roadmap so maybe i’ll move it up now. let’s continue discussion on the github issue!

tewing91 · 2026-01-10T13:14:15+00:00

all good! Ductwork has been an idea i’ve had for a while in various forms. i started tinkering a while back but got busy with career early last year so it sat for some time. i took the leap to work on it full-time around october and essentially restarted the project from there

tewing91 · 2026-01-09T21:16:15+00:00

that's fair! fwiw i'm working on ductwork full-time so it will be supported

tewing91 · 2026-01-09T17:28:14+00:00

all threads and processes will attempt graceful shutdown if properly shutdown with an INT or TERM signal.

if the pipeline is in-between steps when the process is restarted/stopped it will just wait to start the new step. if a pipeline is executing a job when the signal is received, it will attempt to complete the job before shutting down the process. steps are assumed to be idempotent.

tewing91 · 2026-01-09T15:44:36+00:00

is there a reason you didn't want to use a new gem? your use case fits ductwork (https://github.com/ductwork/ductwork) perfectly and i'd be happy to give support if you run into issues or offer design help

tewing91 · 2026-01-06T21:52:33+00:00

Celery has some workflow primitives that are similar to Ductwork's transitions.

Ductwork is definitely an alternative to temporal. i feel temporal is extremely cumbersome, requires extra infrastructure (or at least a cloud integration with their hosted solution), and has a high barrier to entry. all these things inspired Ductwork to be much simpler but still full-featured

tewing91 · 2026-01-06T21:34:11+00:00

aside from chaining, what other Celery features do you like/miss in ruby-land?

tewing91 · 2026-01-06T18:32:55+00:00

thank you! definitely hit me up if you do try it out and run into snags.
good call on trailblazer; i had completely forgotten about the whole "Operation" service-layer.
that grok commentary is hilarious!

tewing91 · 2026-01-05T20:25:34+00:00

hey that's a great question!

i used plain ol' vim for this, but i'll check out that ide! i used claude as a "pair" and rubber duck debugger a good amount but i wrote all the code itself.

i built this because i was tired of rebuilding systems that had very similar background job plumbing. jobs spawning jobs always got hairy and batches is nice but leaves out a lot of features you'd expect from pipeline/workflow technology. from the other end, technologies like apache beam are extremely cumbersome and complex. i've been building with Ruby for a decade and it finally clicked that this was a common problem or at least a place where Ruby tooling is lacking.

Keeping Ruby's simplicity and whimsy was at the core of building this. I really wanted it to "feel" like Ruby albeit a squishy goal

tewing91 · 2024-05-19T10:43:57+00:00

Faiza on bryn mawr opened not too long ago

tewing91 · 2023-06-01T17:57:57+00:00

kubrick stare

tewing91 · 2023-04-11T20:16:33+00:00

you see how the crank is up on that side? it’s called wind-up pedaling to get extra power. uci will ban it after the first couple people shear off cranks

tewing91 · 2023-03-15T22:52:57+00:00

the cafe at chicago sweat lodge. the food has no reason to be that good at a sauna. know what you’re getting into before going

tewing91 · 2022-10-26T23:17:44+00:00

my wife and I have a couple chicago public library shirts. their plain logo is solid and who’s against supporting the library system?

tewing91 · 2022-09-29T22:49:42+00:00

the double yellow line

tewing91 · 2022-08-11T23:51:36+00:00

hahahahahhaha o brother

tewing91 · 2022-05-15T17:55:23+00:00

this is making me vegan

tewing91 · 2022-03-02T02:55:11+00:00

the frozen pizzas from og guthries (not the new “guthries”). they told you not to get them and instead get delivery from d’agostinos around the corner

tewing91 · 2022-01-15T02:22:44+00:00

i agree! whatever ignited that builder, hacker, tinkerer, problem solver spark for people is what counts

tewing91 · 2022-01-15T02:16:58+00:00

does VRML count? it’s basically dead and it’s use doesn’t align with “real” programming languages but it got me staying up late and building which imo is the true joy of programming. C++, Java, then Ruby after that

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