STACK·Since 2025
Redis
Caching, background workers
About
An in-memory data store used for caching, session management, and message brokering. Supports strings, hashes, lists, sets, and sorted sets — all operations run at sub-millisecond latency since data lives in RAM.
Why
Needed background jobs that don't block HTTP responses and fast in-memory caching. Redis covers both without much setup.
Notes
BullMQ on top of Redis was the first time I thought seriously about async processing — accept the request, put it in a queue, handle it separately. That idea later led to RabbitMQ.
Simple rule: fast and temporary goes to Redis, persistent and queryable goes to PostgreSQL. Once you have that rule, you stop second-guessing.