Great Question Makes It Easy for Teams to Perform Customer Research
Running in Production
English - October 04, 2021 04:00 - 1 hour - 68.7 MB - ★★★★★ - 8 ratingsTechnology News Tech News deployment elixir flask hosting node rubyonrails phoenix production python techstacks Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
PJ Murray goes over creating a customer research app with Rails. It's hosted on Heroku and has been running in production since mid-2020.
In this episode of Running in Production, PJ Murray goes over building
a customer research app with Ruby on Rails. It’s hosted on Heroku and has been
up and running since mid-2020.
PJ talks about using feature flags, integrating Stripe with Jumpstart Pro,
building out a React front-end, the value of having business metrics, taking
data security very seriously, having a pragmatic approach around test coverage
and tons more.
Topics Include
4:16 – It took about a month to get the MVP out and a few months after for it to be sellable
6:52 – Motivation for using Rails
8:54 – How the app works and going over some of its screens
13:21 – ActiveJob is such a good abstraction it’s easy to forget what job library you use
14:14 – A bunch of useful gems that are being used
18:14 – The user experience can often impact the technical complexity of what you’re building
21:53 – Feature flags and swinging back to JSONB columns
26:21 – Stripe handles all of the payments
28:24 – The app is pretty much one big monolith and it’s a good thing
29:55 – About 25k lines of Ruby code and 40k lines of Typescript on the front-end
33:04 – If Turbo were around for years would you have used it over React?
36:37 – You shouldn’t be afraid to touch code in your codebase
38:42 – Getting a decent amount of things planned out before implementing the code
44:00 – Postgres, Redis, Mixpanel and Datadog for app and business alerts / logging
49:19 – Limiting access to production data from developers
51:17 – Heroku helped them get to market faster and they had YCombinator credits
54:36 – The deploy process from development to production
1:01:20 – Limiting access at the GitHub repo level and Heroku
1:04:48 – In general backups are handled by the providers they use (Heroku, S3, etc.)
1:07:21 – Heroku will send out alerts if something unexpected is happening with the site
1:09:31 – Best tips? Be pragmatic about testing and code coverage
1:11:58 – User design and UX is handled by a specific team member
1:14:09 – Check out https://greatquestion.co and they’re hiring too
Links
📄 References
https://github.com/excid3/jumpstart
DHH’s YouTube video using esbuild and Tailwind’s CLI
https://github.com/nickjj/docker-rails-example
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_and_Organization_Controls
⚙️ Tech Stack
rails →
ruby →
react →
algolia →
datadog →
github-actions →
mixpanel →
mux →
postgres →
redis →
s3 →
sentry →
stripe →
🛠 Libraries Used
https://github.com/ErwinM/acts_as_tenant
https://github.com/excid3/noticed
https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq
https://brakemanscanner.org/
https://github.com/roidrage/lograge
https://github.com/basecamp/console1984
https://github.com/testdouble/standardrb
Support the Show
This episode does not have a sponsor and this podcast is a labor of love. If
you want to support the show, the best way to do it is to purchase one of my
courses or suggest one to a friend.
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