Visualizers
Learn by moving things
Interactive explainers for the ideas behind retrieval, embeddings, and agents. A formula tells you what is true; dragging a vector shows you why. Each one also appears inside the article it belongs to, and runs entirely in your browser, so drag, poke, and break it.
A queue absorbs a rush
From: Message Queues: Work That Waits Its Turn →A checkout spike of 5,000 orders would melt a slow email step. A queue holds the backlog as depth and lets the worker drain it at a steady rate, so the spike becomes a short wait, not a crash. This is load leveling.
A calm minute: about 50 orders come in, and the email worker keeps up. The queue stays almost empty.
Competing consumers
From: Message Queues: Work That Waits Its Turn →Many workers read the same queue, and each message goes to exactly one of them. Add workers to drain a backlog faster: five hands clear in a fifth of the time, with no message handled twice.
One worker pulling the rail: 5,000 receipts at about 100 a second take roughly 50 seconds to clear.
Visibility timeout and at-least-once
From: Message Queues: Work That Waits Its Turn →A received message is hidden, not deleted, for a visibility timeout. If the worker crashes before acknowledging, the message reappears for another worker. Never lost, but it can run more than once, so keep workers idempotent.
A message waits on the queue, visible for any worker to take.