In this episode of Running in Production, Chad Wilken goes over building a service to help contractors document their job and communicate with their crew. It’s been up since 2014.

Chad talks about handling ~800k photo uploads per day, building a Rails API driven app, creating a great mobile experience with React Native, handling millions of daily Sidekiq (pro) jobs, transitioning to AWS ECS with Fargate, deploying with Capistrano and so much more.

Topics Include

• 3:04 – Motivation for switching from .NET to Rails
• 5:59 – It’s a Rails API with a React front-end, first class mobile support is important
• 9:34 – What type of screens does this app have?
• 11:58 – As the CTO, Chad doesn’t get a chance to code as much as he used to
• 13:15 – A few Rails features and gems being used (interactor, wisper and more)
• 16:35 – Third party sites that they integrate with
• 18:11 – Contracting companies are a lot more technical than you might think
• 22:39 – Every photo upload hits the Rails back-end but it’s not processed there
• 25:30 – Millions of jobs are being run through Sidekiq per day and payments
• 28:46 – Spending time on the company admin back-end vs user features
• 33:20 – Postgres (RDS), MongoDB, Elasticsearch and Redis are being used
• 36:13 – The Flipper gem is being used for feature flags
• 37:44 – Docker is being used in development with a transition to using them in production
• 39:30 – How things are currently deployed and where they’re going with AWS Fargate
• 41:03 – From Chef to Ansible with Capistrano handling app deployments
• 43:35 – Ubuntu is their distro of choice
• 44:00 – Moving over to ECS with Fargate and hiring dedicated ops folks
• 48:28 – A run down of which AWS resources they’re using
• 49:25 – The deployment process from development to production
• 54:59 – All developers on the team can use whichever OS they prefer
• 55:37 – Handling backups of all user data
• 58:22 – Logging, error monitoring and alerts
• 1:01:40 – Best tips? Design patterns are important, so is caching and saying no
• 1:03:48 – Their AWS bill is about $38,000 a month
• 1:05:03 – Check out https://companycam.com, they’re hiring!

Links

• https://readme.com/
• https://buildbot.net/

• rails →
• ruby →
• react →
• react-native →
• ansible →
• aws →
• cloudfront →
• datadog →
• docker →
• elasticache →
• elasticsearch →
• graphql →
• honeybadger →
• lambda →
• mongodb →
• nginx →
• postgres →
• pusher →
• rds →
• redis →
• route53 →
• s3 →
• scout →
• ses →
• slack →
• stripe →
• ubuntu →

• https://github.com/collectiveidea/interactor
• https://github.com/krisleech/wisper
• https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq
• https://github.com/rubocop/rubocop
• https://github.com/ankane/searchkick
• https://github.com/mrkamel/search_flip
• https://github.com/jnunemaker/flipper
• https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano

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.

• Dive into Docker is a video course that takes you from not knowing what Docker is to being able to confidently use Docker and Docker Compose for your own apps. Long gone are the days of "but it works on my machine!". A bunch of follow along labs are included.

• Build a SAAS App with Flask is a video course where we build a real world SAAS app that accepts payments, has a custom admin, includes high test coverage and goes over how to implement and apply 50+ common web app features. There's over 20+ hours of video.