Why I Chose Cron and Queues for Recurring User Reminders — Recovery First
The simplest recurring reminder design is a small scheduler that creates durable jobs, plus workers that can retry each job without guessing what happened. I chose recovery as the deciding axis for a logistics SaaS: a missed reminder is annoying, but a nightly payment reconciliation that cannot be resumed is an operational incident. The trade-off is deliberate. A little state makes the system much easier to repair. That boundary matters. TL;DR: let cron wake up the system, let a queue carry wor…