Lessons from Taking
Ownership of a Rails App.
Presentation by Prakash Murthy / @_prakash at Boulder Ruby User Group meetup on May 12, 2015
Slides at https://slides.com/prakash/rails_app_ownership
About Me:
Prakash Murthy
prakash.n.murthy@gmail.comFreelancing since 2010 as a Ruby on Rails Developer
Comedy Works
- Denver's premier destination for the very best in stand-up comedy since 1981
- Two clubs. One in Downtown, the other in DTC
- 1000+ live stand-up shows every year, ~115K tickets sold in 2014
- 230K signed up users
Rails App : Managing ticketing, users, administration, ...
Started as a Rails 2.1.0 app in Oct 2008
I came on-board as the sole Rails developer in Aug of 2014
Progress since then...
Upgrading ruby from 1.8.7 to 2.2.0 & rails from 2.3.18 to 4.2.0
Aug - Nov 2014
Integrate the newly designed responsive UI views
Dec 2014 - Feb 2015
Go live on both projects
Mar 1, 2015
Have Sane Code Promotion workflow
The previous team made changes directly on the server!
Good News: There are tests!
Bad News: They don't work.
Blessing in disguise as it made me rewrite most of the tests and learn about the system along the way.
Use copy of production database for testing/development (if possible)
Breaks the bad habit of "Testing in Production"
Scripts to copy the production database to
a. Staging Database automatically over-night
b. Local Dev database on Demand.
Going beyond Heroku: Setting up a web server on hosted server is fun, and not too complicated.
ComedyWorks.com runs on a Media Temple machine, on linux OS, powered by Apache HTTP Server & Phusion Passenger
Refer the excellent Phusion Passenger users guide, Apache version document.
The Counter Example: Shopify
Not upgrading ruby/rails versions regularly leads to a world of pain.
Have less Gems :-)
Upgrade related pain : Largely from the plugins/gems that may or may not work with the upgraded ruby/rails version.
Watch the logs!
Exception Notifier Gem - to send emails when an exception occurs in Production.
Helped identify a few bugs
Measure Code Quality using Code Climate
Indicates how difficult it is to maintain, and to make changes in the system.
Communication
Facilitate communication by having good tools
Eg: Pivotal Tracker for project management / tracking bugs & features / communicating on these items
Eg: Slack for team chat. Proved very useful before Go-Live
Questions?
Thank You!
Prakash Murthy
prakash.n.murthy@gmail.com
Slides at https://slides.com/prakash/rails_app_ownership
Lessons from taking ownership of a Rails App.
By Prakash Murthy
