Great Question Makes It Easy for Teams to Perform Customer Research

October 04, 2021 1:15:02 72.03 MB Downloads: 0

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 ⚙️ Tech Stack 🛠 Libraries Used

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