DEV Community: Ivole32

QueueForge Is Taking a Break

Ivole32 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 14:00:00 +0000

This week will be a little different from usual.

The QueueForge team is taking a short break and spending some time away from development. Over the past months, a significant amount of time has gone into building the platform, planning new features, improving infrastructure, and preparing for future growth.

While we enjoy working on QueueForge, we also believe that taking time off is important for maintaining a healthy balance and returning with fresh ideas and motivation.

Because of this, regular development activities will be paused for most of the week. New features, larger infrastructure projects, and long term planning tasks will continue once the team returns.

That does not mean QueueForge is completely unattended. We will continue monitoring our systems and will remain available for important support requests.

In addition, if critical bugs, stability issues, or security related problems are identified, we will continue to deploy patches when necessary. Keeping the platform reliable remains a priority, even during periods where active development is reduced.

This short break also gives us an opportunity to step back and review our plans for the coming months. Sometimes taking a pause is the best way to return with a clearer perspective on what should come next.

We appreciate everyone who continues to follow our journey and support QueueForge while we build the platform.

What Will Continue This Week

Monitoring of platform infrastructure and services.
Handling important support requests.
Deploying critical bug fixes when required.
Deploying security related patches when necessary.
Planning improvements for after the break.

Looking Ahead

Regular development is expected to resume next week. Once we are back, we will continue working on infrastructure improvements, platform development, and the projects currently on our roadmap.

Until then, QueueForge will remain online, monitored, and maintained while the team takes a short break.

See you soon,

The QueueForge Team

Security Monday #1: Securing Our New Server Infrastructure

Ivole32 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 13:30:00 +0000

Welcome to the first edition of Security Monday, a new series from the QueueForge Security Team where we share updates about infrastructure security, operational security, monitoring, and the processes we use to protect our platform.

Security is not something that can be added at the end of a project. It has to be part of the entire development and operations process. With this series, we want to provide insights into the work that happens behind the scenes to keep QueueForge secure and reliable.

As announced in Future Friday #2, we recently deployed new servers that will become an important part of our future infrastructure.

While these systems provide additional capacity and flexibility, deploying new infrastructure is only the first step. A significant part of our current work focuses on securing these systems before they take on production workloads.

We are currently performing extensive hardening of the new servers. This includes reviewing system configurations, reducing unnecessary attack surface, improving access controls, and establishing security baselines that can be applied consistently across the infrastructure.

To support this process, we are using industry recognized standards such as the CIS Benchmarks while also applying our own experience and internal security requirements.

In parallel, we are working on a broader security improvement plan for QueueForge. The goal is to strengthen the security of our existing website and internal services while preparing them for migration to the new infrastructure.

This work includes improving monitoring capabilities, reviewing existing configurations, evaluating operational procedures, and identifying areas where additional safeguards can be introduced.

We are also introducing new internal security standards. One example is a structured audit process that will include regular monthly security reviews. These reviews will help us identify weaknesses earlier, verify that security controls remain effective, and ensure that security remains an ongoing process rather than a one time task.

While much of this work is not directly visible to users, it forms an important part of building a reliable platform that can continue to grow over time.

Highlights of the Week

Started hardening the new server infrastructure.
Applied security guidance based on CIS Benchmarks and internal requirements.
Created a plan for improving the security of existing services.
Reviewed monitoring and operational security processes.
Introduced plans for monthly security audits and reviews.

Looking Ahead

Over the coming weeks, we will continue hardening the new infrastructure and begin transferring security improvements to existing systems and services.

Future editions of Security Monday will cover additional topics related to infrastructure security, monitoring, operational security, and the lessons we learn while building QueueForge.

See you next Monday,

The QueueForge Security Team

Recap Sunday #2: Doing Nothing Can Be Healthy Too

Ivole32 — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the second edition of Recap Sunday, our weekly series where we share what happened behind the scenes at QueueForge during the previous week.

This week was different from most weeks. Instead of focusing heavily on development, planning, or marketing, we decided to take things a little slower.

Over the past months, QueueForge has become a large part of our daily lives. While we enjoy building it, we also know that constantly working without breaks is not sustainable.

Because of that, we spent more time with friends, enjoyed activities outside of development, and allowed ourselves to step away from our computers for a while.

As a result, there is not a long list of new features or technical updates to share this week, and that is completely fine.

We believe that taking breaks is an important part of any long term project. Sometimes the best thing you can do for productivity is to stop working for a moment and come back with a fresh perspective.

While QueueForge remained in our minds, this week was mostly about recharging and maintaining a healthy balance between work and personal life.

Highlights of the Week

Spent more time with friends and family.
Took a short break from intensive development work.
Focused on maintaining a healthy work life balance.
Reflected on future plans for QueueForge.
Returned with fresh motivation for the coming weeks.

Looking Ahead

Next week will probably be similar. We will be traveling for part of the week, which means development will continue at a slower pace than usual.

While we may not spend as much time working on QueueForge, we believe it is important to occasionally step away from a project and return with a clear mind.

We will likely share more about our trip in a separate blog post, so stay tuned for that.

Sometimes progress means moving fast, and sometimes it means taking a break. This week was the second kind, and next week will probably be as well.

See you next week,

The QueueForge Team

Stats Saturday #2: Website Traffic, Productivity & Development Stats

Ivole32 — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 15:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the next edition of Stats Saturday. Every week, we share a few numbers from our work, the habits that help us make progress, and the things that slowed us down.

Website Stats

We want to start by sharing some statistics from our marketing website, even though the results this week were disappointing. Transparency is important to us, and we also want to explain what we believe caused these numbers.

Here are the results:

Unique visitors decreased by 82%
Bounce rate increased by 4%
Average visit duration decreased by 65%

These numbers are clearly not where we want them to be. Here's what we think caused the decline and how we plan to improve.

Problems and Solutions

The biggest issue was inactivity. Our blog and social media channels received very little attention last week because we were focused on other tasks and simply neglected them.

Another challenge was losing access to our X account. We were suspended after sharing our landing page in several replies. We are currently in contact with support and hope to regain access soon, as X has been one of our main sources of website traffic.

Our goal for the coming week is to return to a consistent publishing schedule for both our blog and social media channels.

TikTok Again?

Unfortunately, TikTok continues to be a problem.

This week, we spent a total of 18 hours on TikTok. While this is an improvement compared to last week, it is still far above what we consider acceptable.

We also failed to reach our goal. Last week, we spent 21 hours on TikTok and aimed to reduce that number by 14 hours. We made progress, but not enough.

Other Stats

Besides traffic and productivity metrics, here are a few additional numbers from this week:

Lines of code committed: ~317
Money spent: €0
Purchases considered but not made: €0

We'll share another update next Saturday.

Future Friday #2: New Servers and Security Improvements

Ivole32 — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:30:00 +0000

Future Friday #2: New Servers

During the last days we worked on an important part of the QueueForge infrastructure. QueueForge is currently preparing a move to a new and more local hosting provider.

The new infrastructure gives us more control over our systems, better long term planning and a stronger foundation for future development. At the moment the migration is still in progress and the main QueueForge services are continuing to run on the current infrastructure.

Alongside the infrastructure work we also redesigned parts of our security strategy. New internal rules, improved network structures and better separation between services are now part of the new setup.

Preparation for a new local server infrastructure
Improved internal security planning
Ongoing work on the future website migration
Better structure for future QueueForge products
Long term scalability and stability

More details about our security related work will be published soon in our upcoming Security Monday series.

Development of QueueForge continues alongside the infrastructure changes. We are actively working on ways to keep all QueueForge products secure while preparing the migration of additional services and websites to the new servers.

If you want to follow future updates, infrastructure changes and upcoming releases, you can subscribe to the QueueForge newsletter.

What comes next

Over the next weeks we will continue preparing the migration, improving internal tooling and building the next stage of QueueForge services on the new infrastructure.

Recap Sunday #1: Marketing Progress and Backend Design Updates

Ivole32 — Sun, 24 May 2026 22:08:09 +0000

Welcome to the first edition of Recap Sunday, our new weekly series where we look back at the progress, decisions, and milestones from the previous week at QueueForge.

QueueForge has been in development for quite some time, but this marks the beginning of a new way for us to share our journey and keep you updated on what happens behind the scenes.

This week, our primary focus was on marketing and finding effective ways to introduce QueueForge to a wider audience.

To support this goal, we started implementing a structured content strategy across our social media channels and this blog.

As part of this initiative, you may have already noticed new content series such as Future Friday. Several additional formats are currently in development and will be introduced over the coming weeks.

The initial results have been encouraging. We have already seen positive changes in our analytics, reinforcing our decision to consistently share updates, insights, and behind-the-scenes content about QueueForge.

Although marketing was our primary focus this week, development continued as well. We implemented additional functionality for the core queue management system and finalized several important architectural decisions that will help us build a scalable and maintainable platform moving forward.

One of the biggest topics this week was refining how different components of the backend should communicate with each other. While much of this work is not directly visible to users, these decisions are critical for ensuring reliability, performance, and future scalability.

Highlights of the Week

Created and started executing a structured content marketing plan.
Launched the new Future Friday content series.
Observed positive engagement and growth across our channels.
Implemented additional backend functionality for queue management.
Finalized key architectural decisions for future scalability.

Looking Ahead

Next week, we plan to continue expanding our content efforts, introduce additional recurring content formats, and further develop the core QueueForge platform.

We are excited about the progress we are making and look forward to sharing more updates with you in the next edition of Recap Sunday.

See you next week,

The QueueForge Team

Stats Saturday #1: How Endless Scrolling Steals Our Time

Ivole32 — Sat, 23 May 2026 18:30:00 +0000

Welcome to the first edition of Stats Saturday. Every week we will share a few numbers from our work, the habits that helped us move forward and the things that slowed us down.

The goal is simple. By making our progress public, we want to stay accountable and continuously improve. Some weeks will look better than others, but we believe that tracking the right metrics is one of the easiest ways to identify what works and what needs attention.

How TikTok reduces our productivity

We have to admit something: we spend too much time on TikTok.

This week alone, our total screen time on TikTok reached 21 hours. That is almost an entire day spent scrolling through short videos. While entertainment and breaks are important, this amount of time clearly comes at the expense of other activities.

Those 21 hours could have been used for writing content, improving QueueForge, learning new skills or simply taking proper breaks away from a screen. Instead, much of that time disappeared into endless scrolling.

To reduce this number, we are setting a goal for next week: spend at least 14 fewer hours on TikTok. Public accountability can be a strong motivator, so we will publish our scrolling time every week in Stats Saturday and track whether we are making progress.

The objective is not to completely stop using social media. We simply want to be more intentional with our time and avoid opening an app out of habit.

Website statistics

Using our analytics platform GhostlyX, we were able to review how our recent content strategy performed.

One encouraging result is that posting consistently appears to be working. During the last seven days, the website received 13 unique visitors, representing growth of 116.7 percent compared to the previous period.

If you are reading this article on our official blog, you are part of those statistics.

Another positive metric is the bounce rate, which decreased by 22.8 percent. In practical terms, visitors are exploring more pages instead of leaving immediately after opening the first one.

However, not every number moved in the right direction. The average visit duration dropped by 55.1 percent and now stands at only 22 seconds. This suggests that while more people are discovering the site, the content is not yet keeping their attention for as long as we would like.

Over the coming weeks we will experiment with longer articles, clearer calls to action and more useful content to increase engagement and encourage visitors to spend more time on the website.

Other stats

Besides traffic and productivity metrics, here are a few additional numbers from this week:

Lines of code committed: ~500
Money spent: €0
Purchases we almost made: €9

Looking ahead

Our focus for next week is straightforward:

Reduce TikTok usage by at least 14 hours
Continue publishing content consistently
Increase average visit duration
Maintain growth in website traffic

We will share the results in the next edition of Stats Saturday. If you would like to follow our progress, consider subscribing to the newsletter and checking back next week.

Future Friday #1: Planning the First QueueForge Release

Ivole32 — Fri, 22 May 2026 18:30:00 +0000

Welcome back to another edition of Future Friday, our blog series where we share what we are currently working on, what is happening behind the scenes, and what comes next for QueueForge.

In our previous blog post, we introduced the QueueForge MVP and provided an overview of the first features currently being developed. Since then, our focus has remained on continuing development and turning the planned functionality into a stable and usable product.

Over the next weeks, we will continue working on the MVP, improving existing components, refining the user experience, and preparing the platform for its first users.

While development remains our primary focus, we have also started discussing another important topic internally: how the first version of QueueForge should be released.

Planning the rollout

Launching a new platform is not only about building features. It is also about finding the right way to introduce the product to users and gather meaningful feedback.

For that reason, we are currently evaluating different release approaches for QueueForge.

Private Beta with a limited number of testers
Public Beta available to all interested users
Full public launch after an initial testing phase
A staged rollout combining multiple release phases

Each option offers different advantages. A smaller beta can provide focused feedback and allow us to react quickly to issues, while a broader public release can help us validate the platform under real-world conditions.

At the moment, no final decision has been made. We are reviewing the available options and discussing which approach best supports both product quality and user experience.

Decision coming soon

One of our goals for the coming weeks is to finalize our release strategy and establish a clear roadmap for the first public version of QueueForge.

Once a decision has been reached, we will publish the details and explain exactly how users will be able to access the platform, participate in testing phases, and follow the journey toward the first official launch.

We believe that careful planning now will help create a smoother experience later and allow us to gather valuable feedback as QueueForge continues to evolve.

What's next

For now, development of the MVP continues. We are excited about the progress being made and look forward to sharing more details as both the product and release plans take shape.

Future Friday will continue to provide regular updates on development progress, technical decisions, and important milestones as we move closer to the first release.

Inside the QueueForge MVP | Queue Monitoring Platform

Ivole32 — Tue, 19 May 2026 15:21:10 +0000

Inside the QueueForge MVP

People following QueueForge may have asked themselves what the first QueueForge MVP will look like and what problems the platform is being built to solve.

Today we want to share the current direction of the project, the first planned features, and what the MVP is expected to focus on during the first release.

QueueForge is a platform for hosting and debugging message queue systems. The goal is to make queue systems easier to observe and understand during development and production.

Working with asynchronous systems can quickly become difficult once applications start communicating across multiple services. Messages can fail silently, queues can become overloaded, and debugging issues often requires checking logs across several systems.

The QueueForge MVP is being built to simplify this process by providing a single interface for monitoring queue activity and viewing important queue information in real time.

The first version

The first version of QueueForge will focus on monitoring, visibility, and debugging.

Queue statistics in a single dashboard
Basic monitoring for message throughput
Consumer and producer activity tracking
Simple dead letter queue visibility
Alerting for queue related events
Connection through a custom QueueForge SDK

The dashboard is being designed to stay simple and easy to understand. Instead of exposing large amounts of infrastructure data, the focus is on showing the information developers actually need while debugging queue systems.

This includes queue activity, message counts, consumer status, throughput statistics, and dead letter queue information.

QueueForge SDK

Communication between production applications and QueueForge will be handled through a custom SDK.

The SDK will allow applications to send queue metrics and debugging information directly to the QueueForge backend.

The current goal is to keep the SDK lightweight and simple to integrate into existing applications without requiring major infrastructure changes.

The SDK will also act as the main connection layer between applications and the QueueForge dashboard.

Current focus

Although features, interfaces, and technical decisions may still change during development, the current focus is building the dashboard, defining the SDK API, improving the internal architecture, and creating the foundation for future monitoring and debugging features.

Another important goal of the MVP is keeping the platform simple to use. Many existing tools expose infrastructure metrics but make debugging queue related problems unnecessarily difficult.

QueueForge is being built with a focus on developer experience and usability from the beginning.

What's next

A deeper look into the QueueForge SDK and the technical architecture behind the platform will be shared in future posts.

If you want to follow development updates and future technical deep dives, consider subscribing to the QueueForge newsletter.

Outages QueueForge Could Have Prevented #1 | Transactional Queue Failu

Ivole32 — Thu, 07 May 2026 12:07:05 +0000

Outages QueueForge Could Have Prevented #1 — The Transactional Queue Failure That Silently Lost 21,500 User Actions

In January 2026, Sean Hammond published a detailed writeup about a queue-related outage that caused thousands of user actions to silently disappear.

The engineering team behind Hypothesis had a system architecture that looked completely reasonable on paper:

Save data to Postgres
Push a background job to RabbitMQ
Index the data asynchronously into Elasticsearch

The system worked for years.

Until RabbitMQ failed.

Suddenly, users started creating annotations that appeared to save successfully but later vanished from the application.

Not because Postgres lost data.

Because the queue failed at exactly the wrong moment.

The Architecture That Failed

Their request flow looked roughly like this:

Client Request
    ↓
Write annotation to Postgres
    ↓
Commit transaction
    ↓
Enqueue indexing job in RabbitMQ
    ↓
Return 200 OK

The critical flaw was subtle.

The database transaction and the queue publish operation were completely separate systems with no shared transactional guarantee.

So when RabbitMQ stopped responding:

Postgres commits still succeeded
Queue publish operations failed
The API still returned success responses
Elasticsearch never received indexing jobs

The result was catastrophic:

More than 21,500 annotations existed in Postgres but never appeared in Elasticsearch.

Since Hypothesis relied on Elasticsearch for reads, users experienced this as missing or deleted data.

This is one of the most dangerous categories of outages: silent inconsistency.

The Distributed Systems Problem Behind It

This outage is effectively a real-world version of the Two Generals Problem.

You cannot perfectly coordinate two distributed systems if communication between them can fail.

In practice, the system ended up in this state:

Database commit succeeded
BUT
Queue publish maybe failed

Once this happens, retries alone are not enough unless the architecture was specifically designed for recovery.

Most queue systems still leave this edge case entirely to application developers.

Most teams only discover the flaw after production traffic triggers the exact failure mode.

Why These Failures Are So Dangerous

This outage was not caused by scaling problems, malformed requests, or traffic spikes.

It was caused by a missing reliability guarantee between persistence and asynchronous execution.

Failures like this often create:

Ghost writes
Missing events
Broken search indexes
Orphaned jobs
Impossible-to-debug race conditions

The most dangerous part is that systems often appear healthy while users are actively losing data.

Some requests work perfectly.

Others silently disappear forever.

The Fix: Transactional Job Queues

Hypothesis eventually redesigned the architecture around a transactional queue stored directly inside Postgres.

Instead of:

DB transaction
THEN
external queue publish

They changed the flow to:

BEGIN;

INSERT annotation;
INSERT job;

COMMIT;

Now the write operation and the queued work existed inside the same atomic transaction.

Either both succeeded.

Or neither existed.

That architectural change eliminated the entire category of consistency bugs.

Why More Teams Are Moving Toward Transactional Queues

Increasingly, engineering teams are rediscovering the same principle:

Reliability comes from transactional guarantees, not retries.

Retries help.

Dead-letter queues help.

Backoff strategies help.

But none of them solve the core issue if queue publishing is not transactionally coupled to the state change that created the work.

This is why more systems are moving toward:

Transactional outboxes
Postgres-backed queues
Durable event logs
Exactly-once delivery systems
Atomic enqueue patterns

The industry is slowly realizing that queues are not just infrastructure.

They are part of the application’s consistency model.

What QueueForge Could Have Prevented

This is exactly the category of outage that modern queue tooling should detect before production users notice.

A platform like QueueForge could surface warning signals such as:

Successful database commits paired with failed enqueue attempts
Queue publish latency spikes
Growing transaction-to-job mismatch rates
Missing downstream consumers
Jobs never reaching processing pipelines
Consistency drift between systems

The dangerous part of the outage was not that RabbitMQ failed.

Infrastructure failures happen constantly.

The dangerous part was that the application kept acknowledging success while silently dropping critical background work.

That is the exact failure mode teams need visibility into.

The Bigger Lesson

Queues are usually marketed as scalability infrastructure.

But the hardest queue problems are rarely about throughput.

They are about correctness.

The moment an architecture says:

"Save data now, process later"

it introduces a distributed consistency problem.

If that boundary is not explicitly designed for, production will eventually find it.

Usually after years of “it has always worked fine.”

Usually at 3 AM.

And usually after thousands of records have already gone missing.

Can AI actually make a SaaS platform safer?

Ivole32 — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 22:45:20 +0000

I wanted to test that before even launching QueueForge.

Most startups treat security as a later problem. I am trying to do the opposite.

Even pre MVP, we already built a layered security system:

AI scans for vulnerabilities before deployments
Automated tools catch dependency risks continuously
Manual reviews and a public security program add a human layer

AI already helped us catch real small issues early, which is exactly the point.

It is not about being perfect. It is about not being blind.

I wrote a deep dive on how we approach security from day one.

https://queueforge.dev/blog/how-we-keep-queueforge-safe

Do you think early stage startups underestimate security?

How we keep QueueForge safe

Ivole32 — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 22:22:41 +0000

QueueForge is a SaaS platform for hosting and debugging queue systems. We have a major responsibility to make our product secure and usable without our users having to worry about it. Even though we haven't launched our first MVP yet, we already feel this responsibility. It is not just the product we have to keep safe; it also includes our marketing website, the newsletter, our infrastructure, and our internal tools.

We want to give our future customers a quick dive into security at QueueForge and explain how we combine AI, human expertise, and automated analysis into a cohesive security concept.

How QueueForge uses AI for security

We use AI to scan our code for vulnerabilities and to identify potential exploit scenarios. We run these AI scans before every major deployment and after significant changes to the codebase. Through this scanning, we found multiple small misconfigurations in our reverse proxy and some in our admin dashboard. It is important to remember that these vulnerabilities could not have caused harm, as their impact was low or they were located in internal tools. This is a positive result: if the system finds small problems, it is capable of finding major ones too. We understand that AI cannot replace real people, but it effectively helps us improve the security of our product and website.

How QueueForge uses automated tools for security

We use automated tools to find vulnerabilities in dependencies and "low-hanging fruit" that can be detected through pattern recognition. We use services we trust, though we prefer not to disclose the specific providers. In addition to these tools, we perform npm audit and pip-audit scans every one to three days.

How QueueForge involves humans and the community

QueueForge does not rely solely on automated tools or AI to secure our services. We also perform manual searches for vulnerabilities, specifically before every major deployment that adds new functionality. We implement a "secure by design" concept, though it is common knowledge that this approach alone is not enough. Another key element is our public security research program, where anyone can participate. You can find it at https://queueforge.dev/security. Although we have not received a report yet, we believe this will help us in the future.

Stay up to date

If you want to stay informed about development progress, upcoming features, and announcements, you can subscribe to the newsletter. This is the easiest way to follow updates and new articles from QueueForge.