Offloading Work, Without the Workers

​Led by Brendan Fosberry and Ojus Save from Render

This is part of the CascadiaJS 2026 workshop lineup.
This workshop is part of CascadiaJS 2026 and is only open to registered conference attendees. To attend, please make sure you’re registered for the conference at cascadiajs.com/2026.

​Most tutorials show you how to ship a web app as a single service. But the moment you add a resource-intensive task, your architecture balloons to include worker nodes, a job queue, and an orchestration layer to hold it all together. With AI-powered features showing up in every product, teams are hitting this speed bump earlier than ever.

​In this workshop, you'll learn how to:

• ​Implement background jobs as declarative JavaScript functions using Render Workflows

• ​Compose work into chainable tasks that run across distributed compute

• ​Skip the overhead of managing queues, retries, and worker fleets

• ​Apply the same patterns to real workloads: ETL, batch inference, and AI 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

​Experience level: All levels welcome