Top all-time · #3336
Nextdoor Engineering
Company blog · engblog.nextdoor.comprogrammingsystems
Nextdoor Engineering is the company blog at engblog.nextdoor.com, writing about programming and systems. Since 2014, 23 different Hacker News readers have linked it 40 times, most often “We don’t run cron jobs at Nextdoor”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-03-19, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Nextdoor's engineering blog, mainly its 2016 'We Don't Run Cron Jobs' post on its custom task worker system, when discussing cron, Celery and job scheduling. One comment also mentions the company's hiring.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- We don’t run cron jobs at Nextdoor3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-06-10
- /nextdoor-taskworker-simple-efficient-amp-scalable-ac4f7886957b3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-08-21
- We Don’t Run Cron Jobs (2016)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-08-21
- 3 Hard Lessons from Scaling Continuous Deployment to a Monolith2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-12-09
- A powerful way to integrate Hubot with Slack2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-11-24
- Managing Mobile App Releases2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-09-10
What Hacker News says?
Nextdoor | San Francisco, CA; Toronto, ON, Canada | Full-time, Onsite | https://nextdoor.com/ Nextdoor is the world’s largest social network for the neighborhood, serving 247,000 neighborhoods across eleven countries. We recently closed a $170MM series F where Mary Meeker joined our board, and we officially launched in Canada. To support that, we're opening our first international engineering team in Toronto! Here's…
Comment linking /what-is-the-technology-behind-nextdoor-in-2019-ccc3d2173eda
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2019)”Submitted We Don’t Run Cron Jobs (2016) as a story · 177 points
HN discussionDitto, especially in combination with Python/Django, as used by Nextdoor. Ironically, they had already removed Celery from their stack a few years prior. https://engblog.nextdoor.com/nextdoor-taskworker-simple-effi...
Comment linking /nextdoor-taskworker-simple-efficient-amp-scalable-ac4f7886957b
on “We Don’t Run Cron Jobs (2016)”Submitted Show HN: Bender – Let's Standardize Serverless ETL as a story · 52 points
HN discussionI think they have a task worker system built back in 2014[1], so they need to have something custom working with it as well. Back then I think they really didn't have many options, but if they were to do it again now, I think either AWS Lambda or AWS Batch will serve this type of scheduled job cases very well. [1]: https://engblog.nextdoor.com/nextdoor-taskworker-simple-effi...
Comment linking /nextdoor-taskworker-simple-efficient-amp-scalable-ac4f7886957b
on “We Don’t Run Cron Jobs (2016)”Submitted The technology behind Nextdoor as a story · 46 points
HN discussionIt seems that Nextdoor also had issues with celery[0]. "Scalability" is a great scapegoat for making dubious decisions, but my guess here would be the "task priority" requirement. [0] https://engblog.nextdoor.com/nextdoor-taskworker-simple-effi...
Comment linking /nextdoor-taskworker-simple-efficient-amp-scalable-ac4f7886957b
on “How we designed Dropbox’s ATF – an async task framework”Submitted Maps on Android as a story · 33 points
HN discussionLooks good. Very much looking forward to this being production ready. I am currently looking for a scheduler that provides a better UI/UX than cron alone. Currently, what do you all use for this sort of thing? Nextdoor has a not-yet-open-sourced solution: https://engblog.nextdoor.com/2015/06/10/we-do-not-run-cron-j... that looks great. Does anyone have any experience with Yelp's tron? https://github.com/Yelp/Tron
Comment linking /2015/06/10/we-do-not-run-cron-jobs-at-nextdoor/
on “Kala: A Modern Job Scheduler (written in Go)”Submitted Building a Scalable Geospatial Infrastructure as a story · 15 points
HN discussionI don't really get into this argument anymore - I'm convinced opinions like this are held tighter than religion or politics. Here are a few thoughts, written by others, that I would probably bring up if I wanted to get into this argument: https://medium.com/eshares-blog/why-you-shouldnt-use-cron-jo... https://engblog.nextdoor.com/we-don-t-run-cron-jobs-at-nextd... https://medium.com/videoamp/what-we-learned-migratin…
Comment linking /we-don-t-run-cron-jobs-at-nextdoor-6f7f9cc62040
on “A Scheduler for the Internet”Submitted What to log in production environments as a story · 13 points
HN discussionSubmitted Structured Logs at Nextdoor as a story · 10 points
HN discussionSubmitted Easy A/B testing at Nextdoor as a story · 10 points
HN discussionSubmitted Data Migrations Don’t Have to Come with Downtime as a story · 9 points
HN discussionSubmitted How Nextdoor made a 10x improvement in release times with Docker and Amazon ECS as a story · 9 points
HN discussionSubmitted Functional Testing with Nightwatch, Django, and Docker as a story · 7 points
HN discussionSubmitted 3 Hard Lessons from Scaling Continuous Deployment to a Monolith as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted Android QA at Nextdoor as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted Scaling Nextdoor's Datastores as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Our iOS CI/CD Journey at Nextdoor as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Offline Data Composition at Nextdoor as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Migrating from EC2 Classic to Multiple VPCs as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted We don’t run cron jobs at Nextdoor as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Nextdoor Taskworker: simple, efficient and scalable as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Engineering a culture of fluidity and learning at Nextdoor as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Lessons from Scaling Continuous Deployment to a Monolith as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted How to DRY up your tests without making mummies of them as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Nextdoor CSS Guidelines as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Managing Mobile App Releases as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
