Entrepreneur, Strategist, Operator, Marketer, Connector, Speaker and Mentor. Chief of Staff at DBOS. Opinionated Canadian. Proud mama. (she/her)
Toronto / Worldwide
Joined February 2008
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Heather Anne Ritchie retweeted
Do you like databases?
Do you want to hear two database professors rant about them?
Do you need one of those professors to have a Turing Award for databases?
If yes, then join Mike Stonebraker and I next Wed Dec 10 @ 1:00pm EST for database hot takes:
dbos.dev/webcast-2025-in-rev…
Heather Anne Ritchie retweeted
We usually think of workflows as centralized–there’s a big central orchestrator telling different workers what to do.
But what if they don’t have to be? What if your app servers could run whatever workflows they need without central orchestration? That would be a path towards radically simpler infrastructure.
But building decentralized workflows is inherently challenging. Servers need to cooperate to efficiently schedule and execute workflows, but they can’t directly communicate with each other. How do we make this work?
Check out my new blog post!
👇
Heather Anne Ritchie retweeted
Cool new feature–you can now configure DBOS Python with a custom serializer!
By default, DBOS uses pickle to serialize workflow state to store in Postgres. But for better interoperability or easier integrations, many of you want to use different serializers, like JSON, Pydantic, or anything else in the ecosystem. Now, you can write any serializer you need, plug it in, and it just works.
Heather Anne Ritchie retweeted
My colleague @DevHawk is presenting today at the Seattle Postgres User Group (SEA PUG)! If you're in the area, drop by and say hi :)
"Durable Computing 101 with Postgres and Python"
meetup.com/seattle-postgres/…
Heather Anne Ritchie retweeted
We had our first job posting from a customer on our Discord! And yes, I immediately told them to cross-post in @eatonphil Software Internals channel too.
Awesome to see teams hiring specifically to expand their DBOS use cases. Link to our Discord below.
Heather Anne Ritchie retweeted
Pydantic AI + DBOS durable agent integration is now live! You can now make Pydantic agents durable by wrapping them with DBOSAgent.
I've been really impressed by Pydantic AI. It's flexible and dynamic without requiring a predefined DAG. Execution is automatically traced and can be exported to Logfire for observability. The public API is straightforward to extend with new functionality.
Most importantly, the @pydantic team (especially @DouweM @david_montague_ @samuelcolvin) is very responsive and supportive of contributors.
We designed the integration to be both robust and flexible:
- You can use either sync or async Python.
- The agent's main loop is automatically a DBOS workflow.
- External model calls and MCP communication are DBOS steps with configurable retries.
- You can decide how to handle custom tools: either as a step, a normal Python function (avoiding checkpoint overhead), or a function that enqueues background tasks.
Heather Anne Ritchie retweeted
We're currently on the Hacker News front page! Grateful to @jedberg for sharing his experience running queue services at Reddit, and for reminding us why durable queues matter.
Spoiler alert: "If the queue itself went down... we could just lose votes, or comments, or submissions. Did you ever think ‘I know I voted on that but it’s gone!’ on Reddit? That’s why."
Heather Anne Ritchie retweeted
This isn’t another AI webinar. It’s the blueprint for workflows that don’t quit. Join DBOS & Bauplan to learn how to build autonomous and resilient AI workflows.
oglink.xyz/aq1Jlxbbvj
Heather Anne Ritchie retweeted
DBOS ensures every step in your workflow runs exactly once, even in the face of crashes or network issues. Thanks to time-travel logs, you can restore your application/database to any previous point (before a bug, a bad deploy, or an attack) and replay forward, minimizing impact.
Heather Anne Ritchie retweeted
Congratulations @yutori_ai on the launch!
As a startup founder, few moments compare to watching your customers succeed and knowing your product played a part in their journey. Yutori has been an amazing design partner, using DBOS to build the workflows powering scouts. They’re a smart team with a compelling vision for the future of agents. Now that they're live, I can't wait to see how users experience what they've built!
Heather Anne Ritchie retweeted
3/ Compared to AWS Step Functions or Temporal, DBOS stands out with easy integration and no ongoing hosting fees. Durable execution is finally accessible for every developer, with less friction and more flexibility.
🔗Learn more: dbos.dev/blog/durable-execut…
Heather Anne Ritchie retweeted
🎙️ How does durable execution make AI more reliable? Ryan Donovan is joined on the podcast by @jedberg, CEO of @DBOS_Inc, and @qianl_cs, co-founder, to dive into its use cases, and how it's changing the future of debugging and observability for tech.
stackoverflow.blog/2025/05/2…
Heather Anne Ritchie retweeted
One cool thing about implementing workflows in Postgres is that you can access them from anywhere. All the workflow’s state is in a Postgres table, so you can start new workflows or interact with running workflows with SQL.
So today we released DBOS Clients, which let you programmatically interact with your workflows from anywhere, through Postgres. You can use clients to enqueue new workflows, send messages to your running workflows, or check your workflows’ status. All you need to instantiate a client is a Postgres connection, so you can add them to any service.
We’re going to keep expanding what clients can do over the next few weeks, including more tooling for workflow introspection and management, so stay tuned!
Heather Anne Ritchie retweeted
The most common request we've heard from users has been better support for self-hosting DBOS at scale. You asked, we built.
We're excited to introduce DBOS Conductor, a managed service for operating self-hosted DBOS apps in production. It provides:
- Managed recovery, automatically detecting when a durable workflow is interrupted (for example, if its process is restarted/interrupted/crashed) and recovering the workflow exactly once to another healthy process.
- Observability, providing dashboards visualizing workflow execution status and queued tasks
- Workflow management, letting you cancel, resume, or restart workflows from web UI
What sets DBOS apart from other workflow services is that Conductor runs completely out of band with no access to your private data. It communicates with your app process via a lightweight WebSocket connection, exchanging only workflow metadata and commands. If the connection drops, your durable workflows keep running normally. Thus, Conductor is a great fit for sensitive workloads and distributed deployments across any cloud or on-prem infrastructure.
Conductor is now in developer preview — reach out if you'd like early access! Or read on for more details 🧵
Heather Anne Ritchie retweeted
From @PostgreSQL to DBOS, Mike Stonebraker explains how DBOS is improving on tried and true database technology. 🧵
Heather Anne Ritchie retweeted
Imagine an AI agent handling a product return for you. 📦 It submits the request, but right before confirming the refund, the system crashes. Now what?
With @DBOS_Inc's durable execution, the agent can resume from where it left off, handling real-world tasks reliably.
Heather Anne Ritchie retweeted
Just released the latest version of DBOS Transact!
One big highlight is expanded support for self-hosting, including a new self-hosting guide.
There's also new support for adding DBOS decorators to Python class methods, so you can durably execute workflows implemented in classes!
Links below 👇
