ListenAddict Lets You Subscribe to a Person Like You Would to a Show
Running in Production
English - May 31, 2021 04:00 - 1 hour - 66.4 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
David Parker talks about building a service to subscribe to people with Ruby on Rails. It's hosted on Heroku.
In this episode of Running in Production, David Parker talks about building
a service to subscribe to people with Ruby on Rails and Sapper. It’s hosted on
Heroku ($30 / month) and has been up and running since November 2020.
David talks about creating an API back-end with Rails, trying out Svelte and
Sapper, the challenges of scraping names from websites, figuring out and fixing
PostgreSQL performance issues, finding a good work / life balance and more.
Topics Include
3:27 – Motivation for using Ruby on Rails and Sapper / Svelte
6:18 – Writing raw SQL queries before translating them to ActiveRecord
7:36 – A few Ruby libraries that helped build this project
9:37 – The challenges around scraping human names from various websites
13:17 – The API Rails back-end is a monolithic app with about 100 endpoints
15:44 – David pulls from 94 different sources to find new content
19:06 – The Engtagger gem helps figure out stop words
20:25 – Why did you go with an API back-end?
21:43 – What Svelte and Sapper are and how they help build UIs
25:34 – How the back-end and front-end communicate with each other
28:29 – ~11k LOC on the back-end and ~5 LOC on the front-end
30:49 – At the moment it’s a free service and there’s no ads too
33:23 – What Sidekiq is being used for in terms of background jobs
35:30 – Mailgun is being used to send all transactional emails
37:34 – How the service might be monetized in the future (it’s $30 / month for hosting now)
40:31 – Break down of Heroku Dynos and add-ons
43:17 – Figuring out how to add new people and also using Cloudflare
45:40 – The deployment process from development to production
49:16 – The database is being backed up through Heroku
52:00 – A features table is in the database to enable features for himself
54:37 – Logentries will send out a notification if something goes down
57:50 – What to look out for and how to fix certain performance issues with PostgreSQL
1:01:09 – An example of when to consider breaking up a wide table into multiple tables
1:05:22 – Best tips? Figure out your work / life balance and try the back-end / front-end split
1:11:21 – Find David on Twitter, https://www.programmingtil.com/ and his YouTube channel
Links
📄 References
https://www.mturk.com/
https://github.com/evanw/esbuild
https://www.snowpack.dev/
https://dev.to/svelte-radio/building-listenaddict-with-david-w-parker
https://github.com/heroku/heroku-pg-extras
http://rachbelaid.com/postgres-full-text-search-is-good-enough/
https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology
⚙️ Tech Stack
rails →
ruby →
svelte →
sapper →
cloudflare →
honeybadger →
logentries →
mailgun →
new-relic →
postgres →
redis →
vercel →
webpack →
🛠 Libraries Used
https://github.com/heartcombo/devise
https://github.com/waiting-for-dev/devise-jwt
https://github.com/yohasebe/engtagger
https://github.com/rack/rack-attack
https://github.com/rubocop/rubocop
https://prettier.io/
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