What co-founding a startup taught me about queues

Early-stage startups don't get to buy reliability, they have to design it. At Challenge Place our real-time features needed ordering and throughput guarantees we couldn't afford to get wrong. Redis plus Lua scripting gave us atomic queue operations without another moving part in the stack. One well-tested Lua script replaced what could have been a whole message-broker deployment. Constraints are a gift. Some of the most reliable systems I've built were reliable because we couldn't afford them not to be.