Mike Perham

Sidekiq in the terminal

Mike Perham — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 10:35:10 -0700

My favorite tech movement in 2025 wasn’t anything artifical, but rather the resurgence in interest around building terminal interfaces with two new frameworks, Charm and Ratatui, which make developing pure text user interfaces easier than ever before using Go or Rust. They provide a huge set of components and examples showing you how to build various types of functionality.

Mainframe applications ruled the 70s and 80s, providing terminal interfaces for business operations. You might still see a ticket agent using a terminal to check you in at the airport. That’s an interface to a mainframe application, allowing the agent to lookup your ticket and assign you a seat quickly, with just a few keystrokes. To this day I remember my mom, a pharmacist, complaining about the new DOS -> Windows upgrade that the IT department rolled out to stores. Navigating their retail point of sale terminal application was much faster with a keyboard, the Windows version required a stream of precise mouse clicks and couldn’t rely on typing by muscle memory. Today interactive terminal interfaces are rare but I think Charm and Ratatui make this option much easier to provide.

Adding Mastodon Comments

Mike Perham — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 16:13:50 -0800

I’m enabling comments via Mastodon using this webcomponent. @dpecos has done a nice job keeping it self-contained and has made good tradeoffs in functionality vs simplicity IMO. Thanks @sardaukar!

Sidekiq 8.0: Profiling

Mike Perham — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 11:30:52 -0700

Sidekiq is the most popular background job framework for Ruby applications and over the last 13 years, it has reached maturity in its feature set. It has filled out much of its original design so adding a major new feature is a comparatively rare event these days.

For years I’ve wanted Ruby to support thread-safe profiling. Historically Ruby’s profiling APIs were process-global. Data is collected for everything running in the process, making job profiling within a running Sidekiq process noisy and harder to read than ideal.

Sidekiq 8.0: Improvements to the Web UI

Mike Perham — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 12:07:17 -0700

Since its release last month, Sidekiq 8.0 has been very smooth with few reported issues. I’ve been quite happy with the rollout and wanted to provide a little more context about the changes. My goals for any user-friendly, high quality software is to reduce dependencies and keep it simple. Sidekiq 8.0 brings a significant overhaul to its Web UI and these changes further those goals.

The Web UI was introduced in 2012 in Sidekiq 0.9 and used Sinatra for its framework along with Twitter Bootstrap for CSS. Sidekiq 4.2 removed the Sinatra dependency (thanks @badosu!) and made the Web UI a plain Rack app with no framework.

Introducing Sidekiq 8.0

Mike Perham — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 12:09:25 -0800

After six months of hard work, I’m thrilled to announce the general availability of Sidekiq 8.0! 🥳🎉

Status

Sidekiq is used by thousands of Ruby applications around the world to scale job processing up to billions of jobs/day. Current Sidekiq Enterprise customers are reporting a grand total of 1,806,671,058,604 jobs processed, almost two trillion, with my largest customer executing up to 250,000 jobs/sec. Got a Ruby/Rails app and want to try out Sidekiq? See Test Drive to get started quickly.

Conventional Commits

Mike Perham — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 11:27:04 -0800

Conventional Commits is a defacto standard for writing commit messages in a manner more useful for both humans and machines. Examples:

feat(batches): adjust callback data model to conform to naming standards
ci: add ruby 3.4 to matrix
style: upgrade standard formatting

I learned of conventional commits recently and like the simplicity and ease of use. I want to use this standard going forward for all of my projects but I had one problem: how do I train myself to use this every time? It’s too easy to forget or skip without some sort of prompt or cheatsheet so that’s exactly what I did!

Sponsoring Hanami

Mike Perham — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 12:06:36 -0800

I’m happy to announce a substantial $12,000 grant to the Hanami framework. I’ve been a massive believer in Open Source software since publishing my first open source project in 1995. There’s nothing more empowering than direct access to the exact source code needed to solve a problem.

But Ruby has a problem: it’s mostly a monoculture around Rails. Merb and Sinatra provided valuable app framework options in the past, I believe we need new options for the future.

Iteration and Sidekiq 7.3.0

Mike Perham — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 09:00:00 -0700

Sidekiq is the most popular background job framework for Ruby and works really well if you follow the design guidelines: keep your jobs short and idempotent. What happens if you have a job which processes a large amount of data serially, the infamous long-running job? In that case, deployments can lead to the job failing mid-way because the job will not gracefully allow the Sidekiq process to restart. To fix this, Sidekiq 7.3 just shipped with a major new feature: Iterable Jobs.

Redis Licensing Changes and You

Mike Perham — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 08:53:20 -0700

A few weeks ago, the owners of Redis changed its licensing from BSD to a more limited source available license. As far as I know this was done in order to prevent service providers from adding their own closed source, proprietary changes to their Redis service offerings.

In principle I like this change.

My Faktory project uses the AGPL license for the same purpose: Faktory is open source and anyone who offers Faktory as a service with proprietary changes should have to open source those changes too. I consider this a valuable quid pro quo: if you change my open source to make money, you must contribute some of that value back to the community in return.

Serializing Ruby datatypes in JSON

Mike Perham — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 09:42:08 -0800

Ruby’s JSON library allows you to convert Ruby datatypes into a JSON document, as long as those types are native to JSON: String, bool, int, float, nil, Hash and Array. Everything else converts to a String by default; if you use any other core datatypes, they will not survive a JSON.generate/JSON.parse round trip. Here I pass a Range, Symbol and Time; notice how the end result is three Strings instead of the actual types: