Sep 22 2012

If you’ve ever done background job stuff with Rails, you’ve probably used Resque. Resque is “Yet Another GitHub Project They’ve Open Sourced and Then Abandoned.” But Resque is super awesome: it builds a job queue on top of Redis, which is a totally awesome piece of software.

Anyway, Resque has been psuedo-abandonware for a while now. In January, Terence Lee from Heroku got in charge of the project, but it’s a big job. Too big of a job to properly manage alone. It’s hard to sift through 60 pulls and 120 open issues, some of which have been open for a few years. And manage the 1.x line while working on new stuff for 2.0. And debug issues that basically boil down to “When I upgrade Resque and this random gem, everything breaks, but when I downgrade that other gem, it works again. But Resque throws the error.”

Even outside of heroics, the bus factor on a project that’s as important as Resque should be higher than one.

So Terrence gave a presentation at Frozen Rails, and in it, he outlined what needs to be done for Resque 2.0, and asked for some help getting it out the door. So myself and a few other people are gonna pitch in and help out, and we’d love to have you.

Here’s the deal: I will personally be looking at (and already have read) every single open issue on GitHub. Feel ignored about something involving Resque? You can come to me. I can’t guarantee that I can get it fixed, but at least I’ll help you figure out wtf is going on, and get us a bug report that we can use to build a fix.

Think of it as decoupling the front end from the back end: Terrence can focus on writing new code, and I can focus on paying attention to your problems, helping you solve them, and getting fixes applied to the 1.x branch.

If you’re interested in helping out, we’d love to have you. Helping triage issues would be awesome, fixing bugs would be awesome, writing code would be awesome, updating docs would be awesome.

Let’s do this.