Recently we ran into a situation at work where we needed to move all messages from one of our dead letter queues, back onto the “live” queue for the service. AWS doesn’t expose a way to move messages out of the box, so I wrote a small utility, which I creatively named sqsmv. I wrote the project in Go because it is a great fit for command line programs, and I’ve also worked with the Go AWS SDK before.

I have a personal project where a Sidekiq worker (written in Ruby) was using between 150-200MB of RAM with 20 workers. These workers take images that have been uploaded to a Rails application, and upload them to an Amazon S3 bucket in the background. Most of the time these workers are idle. This project generates exactly $0.00 income, and I’m paying for that RAM, which even in the amazing days of cloud computing, is still too expensive to waste on a personal budget.

Running multiple versions of Go is simple. I see and hear chatter about it, and there are a few tools around to handle it for you, but it is so simple to do yourself that I’m surprised people reach for a tool to do this for them. Mostly I run the latest stable version of Go, but for whatever reason (maybe I want to test out a release candidate), I do have multiple versions installed, and I don’t want multiple installations to clobber each other.