Athena (/əˈθiːnə/) is the goddess of wisdom, craft, and war.
Athena is our notifications worker, processing things like new message notifications, new thread notifications, new member notifications, etc. Athena is built to read off of our Redis queue. Most queues in Athena handle the sending of both in-app notifications as well as email notifications (by dispatching a new job to the Redis queue for Hermes to read).
This server also does the heavy lifting of keeping track of the lastSeen field on usersThreads, which is what powers the small 'New Messages' badge that users see when viewing threads on Spectrum. While not directly a notification, the lastSeen field is a critical piece of Spectrum that helps people keep up with the most important and active conversations in their communities.