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A few articles ago, I wrote about how to monitor Sidekiq retries using AWS Lambda. Retries are often the first indication of an issue if your application does a lot of background work. As Bark continues to grow, we became interested in how the number of jobs enqueued and retrying trended over time. Using AWS Lambda to post this data to CloudWatch, we were able to visualize this data over time. The

It’s no mystery I’m a Sidekiq fan – my background job processing library of choice for any non-trivial applications. My favorite feature of Sidekiq has to be retries. By default, failed jobs will retry 25 times over the course of 21 days. As a remote company, we use Slack to stay in touch with everyone AND to manage/monitor our infrastructure (hello #chatops). We can deploy from Slack (we don’t ge

In the recent series on transitioning to microservices, I detailed a path to move a large legacy Rails monolith to a cluster of a dozen microservices. But not everyone starts out with a legacy monolith. In fact, given Rails popularity amongst startups, it’s likely most Rails applications don’t live to see 4+ years in production. So what if we don’t have a huge monolith on our hands? Are microservi

I recently wrote some code to interface with Stripe’s webhooks. After looking at the code and tests, I decided I needed to do something to make it easier to test all pricing tiers— something I wasn’t able to easily do from the start. Dependency injection was a necessary piece of that puzzle. I’ve always been curious about the various forms of dependency injection and the effects each would have on

If you’ve used validates in a Rails Active Record model, you know they work great – at least until the first bit of complexity arises. At that point, they can quickly morph in to a ball of conditional spaghetti convoluting the initial reason the validation was added in the first place. I recently had an experience using has_secure_password where I wanted control the length of the user-supplied pas

Facebook’s news feed popularized the relative timestamp format of “X hours ago”. For good reason too…why print an absolute timestamp so that people have to do the relative calculation in their head? It’s one less step for the user, and to be fair, pretty easy to implement. Rails helpers to the rescue Rails has a view helper aptly named time_ago_in_words. If you use the created_at attribute from a

I previously wrote about how I handle environment configuration in Rails. Along with solutions like the dotenv gem, it relies on entirely on environment variables. One of the highlighted features of Rails 4.1 was the config/secrets.yml file. By default, this file contains the secret_key_base and defers to the ENV variable of the same name in the production environment. Even though secret_key_base

I’ve been fortunate to spend the last month as the sole developer of greenfield Rails 4.1 app. As someone who’s spent quite a bit of time maintaining existing code, the freedom to establish patterns and choose tools is a highly welcomed change. One of the choices I made was to use Minitest and Rails fixtures. The short is…it’s been great! So great that I’m having trouble imagining myself using any

I’ve recently had the good fortune of working on a greenfield Rails app. The app is heavily dependent on times and recurring events (weekly). Naturally, I dragged in the timecop gem to handle freezing time, so my I could properly assert that certain events took place in the tests. With the release of Rails 4.1, the time stubbing method travel_to was added. This new helper method forces the current

Learn to Build a Ruby Gem. Whether you're an expert Rubyist, or just starting out, this book will guide you through the process of creating your own Ruby gem from start to finish. Sound good? Jump straight to the packages. What you'll learn How to Build a Ruby Gem The book will guide you through the process of how to build a Ruby Gem. From bootstrapping the project to releasing to RubyGems.org, yo

This is one of the final post leading up the the launch of the Build a Ruby Gem Ebook, which is now available for sale in 3 packages, including 14 chapters of code and over 2 hours of screencasts. The world isn’t black and white (as much as we’d like to believe it is). Just because our gem’s functionality may work for us, doesn’t mean it’ll work for everyone. Fortunately, we can give users the abi

This is one of the final post leading up the the launch of the Build a Ruby Gem Ebook, which is now available for sale in 3 packages, including 14 chapters of code and over 2 hours of screencasts. One of the simplest and most common application of background processing is sending emails outside of a web request. And while background processing is pretty common, most existing Ruby background proces

UPDATE: I’ve written an updated article on this and the larger topic of organizing Javascript within a Rails project that includes Turbolinks. The asset pipeline has made including javascript in Rails applications a breeze. Without any additional changes, the code included in your app is executed on every page. However, with a combination of CSS class scopes and a jQuery plugin, you can isolate ce