How does LISTEN/NOTIFY compare to using select for update skip locked? I thought listen/notify can lose queue items when the process crashes? Is that true? Do you need to code for those cases in some manner?
LISTEN/NOTIFY and SELECT FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED serve different purposes in PgQueuer. LISTEN/NOTIFY notifies consumers about changes in the queue table, prompting them to check for new jobs. This method doesn’t inherently lose messages if a process crashes, because it simply triggers a check rather than transmitting data. The actual job handling and locking are managed by SELECT FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED, which safely processes each job even when multiple workers are involved.
In some systems, those are, effectively, the same. A consumer listens, and the signal is the message. If the consumer process crashes, the message returns to the queue and gets processed when the consumer comes back online.
If the signal and messaging are separated, as in Postgres, where LISTEN/NOTIFY is the signal, and the skip locked query is the message pull, the consumer process would need to do some combination of polling and listening.
In the consumer, that could essentially be a loop that’s just doing the skip locked query on startup, then dropping into a LISTEN query only once there are no messages present in the queue. Then the LISTEN/NOTIFY is just signaling to tell the consumer to check for new messages.
I think the usage of listen/notify is just a mechanism to save you from querying the database every X seconds looking for new tasks (polling). That has some drawbacks, because if the timeout is too small, you are making too much queries that usually may not return any new tasks, and if it's too big, then you may start processing the task long after it was submitted.
This way, it just notifies you that new tasks are ready so you can query the database.
I used Alacritty for couple of years, before switching to WezTerm almost a year ago.
There were two reasons for my change, the Alacritty devs are really obsessed with speed, which is good, but.. means less features, even _optional_ features like ligatures. I like ligatures, and because they slow down the rendering slightly the alacritty devs do not want to include it[0]
The other reason is that I wanted a way to have my terminal have two different colorschemes, light for the day and dark for the night. It seems that it might be supported now with alacritty[1]? But it does also seem like you need an external script still to do it..
I went with WezTerm because it supports both natively, everything else feels the same TBH, but the fact that WezTerm has more features that are optional, is what I liked.
Yes, I did, but it's been a while and I don't remember off the top of my head the details why I settled with wezterm.
What I can say is, that I find wezterm configuration quite pleasant. Overall I think they are in the same league but Alacrity gets a lot more attention and that's why I like to remind people that there is wezterm too.
Haven't read the comments, but I have something to contribute. I am married and a parent of a 1.5-year-old child. Employed at a full-time job, working out is something I consider mandatory. Adding all this together, plus household chores, it leaves little time for personal projects or just chilling out by myself. I used to stay up late to get some alone time, but as the article describes, it is not sustainable, especially for parents.
I had a project I wanted to work on, but it was difficult to focus at night after everything else was taken care of. So I flipped it. I started waking up early. I aim for 5 am; recently, it's been more like 6 am, but I've been thinking of trying out 4 am. I've never been a morning person, but you do get used to it after a few weeks. Now, I use the fresh morning energy to work on my side project, and from the moment my daughter wakes up, I start with all the responsibilities. I work out in the evening, and I don't dread going to sleep early because I wake up to my time. So, the earlier I get to bed, the more "me" time I get.
I've started doing this as well this year, waking between 0530 and 0700. I work out within an hour of getting up.
I'm usually ready for work between 0930 and 1030. It required a LOT of training (I am not, historically, a morning person) but I have been super consistent with it for the last few months.
On a plus side, I can get up without an alarm now on a consistent basis. On the minus side, I now get super sleepy at 2200, which makes hanging out late very difficult.
The alternative was starting work when I got up, but the flipside to this was my workouts getting on super late if I got hit with a late meeting. I still work out like this while I'm traveling. It usually means I have to skip on team dinner, which sucks.
One of the times in my life I got along the best with little sleep was when I woke up before dawn to go surfing. I still went to bed after midnight, but the excitement of going into the ocean got me out of bed quick as lightning. There's something to that idea for sure.
