Ilya Brin - Software Engineer

History is written by its contributors

NSQ: The Perfect Message Queue - When Redis Isn't Enough)

Hey distributed systems architect! 🚀

Tired of Redis queues losing messages? Fed up with RabbitMQ’s complexity? Need something that just works at scale? Meet NSQ - the message queue that powers Discord, Bitly, and other high-traffic systems.

While others struggle with queue complexity, you’ll learn when NSQ is not just useful, but absolutely perfect for the job.

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Go Channel Hell: How We Defeated chan map[string]*map[int]chan struct{}

2025-05-14 8 min read Golang Concurrency Refactoring Ilya Brin

Hey Gopher! 👋

Have you ever seen code like chan map[string]*map[int]chan struct{}? If yes, then you know what channel hell is.

This is a story about how we started simple, reached nightmare, and found an elegant solution. A real-time notification system that grew from 100 users to 100,000, and how we refactored the channel architecture.

Spoiler: we ended up replacing all this horror with 3 simple interfaces and typed channels 🚀

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