Common Actions on Messages in a Queue

I like the "back to basics" approach of these kinds of blog posts. My apps use Resque for fairly basic queuing behavior, and it's always nice to read something like this to refresh my imagination about what's possible in a good queue system, and think outside the box that is my code.

If IronMQ was easier to hot-swap as a Resque back-end (or job processor like Sidekiq, if I understand it correctly) then I'd be more strongly tempted to jump over for some of its smarter queueing features that I haven't gotten around to rolling in to my own Resque setup.

We needed something like this years ago when I was at Charles Schwab, we had like 3 different engineering groups that all wanted to use their own stack. At the time we were stuck having to all integrate with ONE of the groups SOAP API's, a message queue like this could have helped by providing a common protocol for all of us to pass our messages around.