Over on Stitch Fix’s engineering blog, I wrote a new post on how we deal with tricky job failures. Namely, make your jobs idempotent:

Trapping Resque::TermException is really just kicking the can down the road. You might prevent some of your jobs from failing, but you’ll still get failed jobs. Granted, they will fail at a lower rate, but it’s still a rate correlated to the scale of your business.

The underlying problem is that jobs aren’t idempotent.

Check out the entire thing here.