PyCon Sweden 2025

JeyBee

Jan Bjørge (JeyBee) is a Norwegian software engineer with a master’s degree in Cybernetics (University of Stavanger, 2015) and a decade of Python experience. He began as a field telecoms engineer before moving into software, eventually becoming Tech Lead at conversational-AI firm boost.ai.

After a short period as Principal Analyst at Equinor, delivering data-intensive tooling for subsurface modelling, Jan joined Pio in 2024 as Senior Software Engineer. At Pio he works on the backend that powers the company’s automated storage-and-retrieval warehouse platform, exposing APIs that connect e-commerce stores, shipping providers and ERP systems to AutoStore robotics.

Outside work he maintains pgqueuer—a PostgreSQL-native task queue and scheduler created on his own time.


Session

10-30
15:00
30min
Shrinking Infrastructure: Task Queues on PostgreSQL
JeyBee

Most Python teams already run PostgreSQL—but when it comes to background jobs, they often add Redis, RabbitMQ, or Celery on top. pgqueuer takes a different approach: it turns Postgres itself into a complete task queue.

At its core, pgqueuer uses simple tables to capture jobs and their metadata. Workers safely lease jobs with FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED, a Postgres feature that enables concurrent consumers without collisions. Idle workers wake instantly on new jobs via LISTEN/NOTIFY, while a fallback polling loop ensures progress even if notifications are lost.

On top of this foundation, pgqueuer adds the pieces needed in production: exactly-once dequeueing, heartbeats and cancellation for long-running tasks, and retry semantics for failure recovery. A built-in CLI dashboard provides live insight into throughput, latency, and error counts—no extra services required.

This talk walks through pgqueuer’s design and shows how PostgreSQL features can form a reliable, observable job system. Attendees will leave with a understanding of how to run production-ready background jobs directly on the database they already trust.

Auditorium