Happy Birthday Sidekiq!

2013-02-05

This day last year I released Sidekiq 0.5.0 to the public. I left Carbon Five in mid-January and was moving to Portland to join The Clymb with wife and child in tow. For the previous few months, I’d been thinking about background processing and felt there was opportunity for a library that was more efficient and also provided more functionality. I spent my two weeks of downtime building what became Sidekiq.

In one year, some numbers:

Sidekiq Pro has been available for four months now and sales have ramped up as Sidekiq gained traction, exactly like I had hoped. January was my biggest sales month so far. Thank you to my Pro customers!

My goal for the first year was to become one of the big three: I wanted people to see Sidekiq as a peer to Resque and Delayed Job. I think that’s true now and believe Sidekiq has matched Delayed Job in terms of project velocity. For the next year, my goal is to overtake Resque and make Sidekiq the #1 background job library for Ruby. There will always be a place for other libraries for various reasons (e.g. redis not available) but I believe Sidekiq’s great performance and wide range of functionality can’t be beat by any competing library today.

It’s been fantastic working with new contributors, noticing more and more people recommend Sidekiq to their friends and seeing my vision of simple, efficient background processing becoming reality. I promise to continue support for Sidekiq and hope this year goes just as well as the first!