I needed to coordinate background scripts running across different machines. The obvious answer was Redis. Everyone uses Redis for this. The tutorials all use Redis. The Stack Overflow answers all say "just use Redis." So I looked at what deploying Redis would actually cost me: A running Redis server I had to maintain A broker to connect workers to it Celery or RQ on top of that Memory-based stora
There's a moment every developer knows. You need to generate a PDF. It looks simple. You've done harder things. Three hours later, you're reading a Stack Overflow thread from 2016 that ends with "works on my machine." This post is about that moment — the actual options, what breaks in each, and where I landed after years of hitting this in production. It uses a stripped-down WebKit engine and conv