Offloading Work, Without the Workers
This workshop is free for attendees of CascadiaJS 2026.
- When: Tuesday, June 2 (10:20am - 12:20pm)
- Where: Town Hall, Forum level
- Instructors: Brendan Fosberry and Ojus Save
The moment your web app needs to offload resource-intensive tasks, your architecture changes. What starts as a single service suddenly balloons to include worker nodes, a job queue, and an orchestration layer to hold it all together. With the continuing surge in AI-powered features, teams are hitting this architectural speed bump early and often.
In this hands-on workshop, you’ll use Render Workflows to implement background jobs as declarative JavaScript functions. You’ll compose work into chainable tasks and run them across distributed compute, without managing queues, retries, or worker fleets. The result is a much simpler model for real workloads like ETL, batch inference, and (you guessed it) agents.
What you’ll walk away with:
- A background execution pipeline deployed using Render Workflows
- Chainable task functions you can adapt for your own workloads
- Hands-on experience with distributed compute without queue management overhead
Prerequisites:
- Laptop with internet access
- GitHub account
- Node.js 18+ installed
Most AI agent tutorials end at "call the LLM API and return the result." But what happens when your agent needs to do five things at once, each one taking 30 seconds, and you don't want your users staring at a spinner for three minutes?
In this workshop, you'll learn how to:
- Build and deploy a multi-service app that handles concurrent AI workloads
- Use durable workflows to make long-running tasks survive crashes, timeouts, and restarts
- Add fault tolerance patterns: auto-retries, circuit breakers, graceful degradation
- Orchestrate parallel work across background workers that scale independently
What you'll walk away with:
- A deployed, production-ready app powered by durable workflows
- A GitHub repo you can keep building on
Prerequisites:
- Laptop with Node.js installed
- GitHub account
- Code editor of your choice
Experience level: All levels welcome
Our Sponsors
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It’s got everything — a dedicated fan base of 10+ years, close family vibes, long held traditions (the best karaoke!), sublime locale, and a flair for the atypical/creative conf sessions.
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— Charlie Gerard (@devdevcharlie) September 2, 2022
Once again, @CascadiaJS did not disappoint—I love that we have a community-focused conference right in the PNW. It's always inspiring to hear about what people are making, stretch my perspective, and meet new friends.
— Mark Palfreeman 🪐 (@markpalfreeman) September 3, 2022
Also Sunriver resort was awesome 🤘#CascadiaJS pic.twitter.com/SKlPeHibHE
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Some wonderful memories were made, and the combination of nature and lovely people made it so special. pic.twitter.com/F4JC0318pe
Wow, what a week at @CascadiaJS! Our team thoroughly enjoyed connecting with other engineers, learning from various talks, & experiencing beautiful Sunriver, OR. We wanted to thank everyone who helped organize this event; it was spectacular, and we cannot wait to be back in 2024. pic.twitter.com/vCO33rBTFa
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Attended #CascadiaJS last week! Awesome speakers/workshops and very well done virtual/hybrid experience! Can't recommend it enough for developers no matter where they are in their coding journey! 🖥️🌲#webdevelopment #javascript #CascadiaJS2021 #PNW pic.twitter.com/imknQzJmBZ
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Had an amazing time at @CascadiaJS. See you next year! pic.twitter.com/eJYIkqHVMf
— Treasure Porth (@treasureporth) November 13, 2019
I was honored to participate in #CascadiaJS again this year. I've been so impressed again with all the creativity and effort the organizers, speakers, and community puts into making it a uniquely fun event. ✨ pic.twitter.com/x0byI4utED
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Yeah, tonight was great. #CascadiaJS pic.twitter.com/4hHgTP46fg
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Awesome @CascadiaJS afterparty at the @LivingComputers
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I had so much fun. #CJS18 pic.twitter.com/xUiF2iupz6
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