Having played with NSQ off and on for the past few months, and having gone deeper with it over the past week or so in preparation for rolling out a production service, here are a few things that have really impressed me, in no particular order:

It's super easy to run. A few command line params, if that, and I've got a local nsqd running that I can develop and test against. Great for those offline coding sessions on BART.

The tools it ships with are very handy, specifically to_nsq and nsq_tail. Again, both make developing stuff really easy because I can get stuff in and out with fast, native command line tools or http. In fact, when I was first playing around I built an entire prototype based on a few simple shell scripts and the provided tools, just to see what would happen.

The nsqadmin and nsq_stat tools give you a lot of visibility into what your producers and consumers are doing, how well things are performing, who is connected to what, etc. And again, part of the distribution and very easy to run locally.

The Go producer and consumer API is clean and easy to build around, pretty well documented with a lot of examples in the NSQ apps themselves.

So far very stable. I haven't seen any crashes on the server or producer/consumer side.

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