Resque is a Redis-backed library designed to manage background jobs by placing them on multiple queues and processing them later, offering a solution for handling a large volume of jobs efficiently. GitHub developed Resque after facing limitations with various background job systems like SQS, ActiveMessaging, BackgroundJob, DelayedJob, and beanstalkd, each of which presented challenges such as latency, CPU overhead, and lack of essential features. While DelayedJob was initially promising, it struggled with scaling issues and lacked certain functionalities needed by GitHub, which heavily relies on background work. Resque addresses these issues by utilizing Redis for queue management, allowing for atomic operations, high visibility, and persistence, while providing a robust monitoring system with a web interface, a forking model for responsiveness, and customizable failure backends. This approach enables GitHub to maintain a scalable, efficient, and reliable background job processing system that meets its demanding requirements.