Shipping & Running
$defineworker--plain-english
TLDRA small program that runs one job on demand.
The waiter should not also be in the basement folding laundry.
A worker is a small program with one errand. The HTTP handler takes the click and answers. The worker sends the mail, talks to the slow API, chews a file, writes the summary. Then it is done.
You will hear the word in three hallways. Do not mash them.
Same shape: one job, then out of the way. Different building.
At a hackathon the tell is a spinner that has nothing useful to show. If the user is waiting for work they do not need on screen, you wanted a worker and a line, not a fatter request handler. Signup can return "you're in." Welcome email can land thirty seconds later. The pitch does not care.
When the hallway floods — forty signups, forty receipts — you do not rewrite the frontend. You run more copies of the same small program. That is the whole scaling story people dress up with logos.
create-hackhaton-space-stack will give you routes that answer people. Workers are what you add when "answer people" and "do the slow thing" start punching each other. The CLI scaffolds the window. You decide what happens behind the wall.
What this unlocks
Once you can name the specialist, you stop stuffing every leftover into the request. The API stays a window. The worker is the person behind the wall who only ever does one ticket. Cheap. Focused. Disposable. Need a hundred? Spin a hundred. Need none? Run none.
The dining room stays open. The laundry finishes when it finishes.
