Collecting a payment sounds like a reasonably well-defined problem. A traveler pays for a booking, the payment succeeds, and the property manager receives the money. Read on →
In the previous blog post, I promised we would introduce something special this time. So here we go - meet almighty Dionysus, who knows how to make the most of Kafka. Read on →
In the last blog post, we covered some fundamental concepts about Kafka. This time, let’s discuss how we use Kafka in Smily, how we got where we are now, what the decision drivers were, and how the overall architectur... Read on →
In the last blog post, we covered a general overview of integration patterns for distributed architecture, and now it’s time to get into further details. Read on →
Distributed architectures have been growing in popularity for quite a while for some good reasons. The rise of cloud services making the deployments simpler, as well as the ever-growing complexity of the applications,... Read on →
Service objects and/or after_commit callbacks are ubiquitous in most real-world Rails applications. Whether it’s a good idea or not (ActiveRecord callbacks - I’m looking at you) is a different story, but one thing tha... Read on →
Communication between two or more applications is often everyday stuff, and it might seem that there is not too much to add there as this subject has been covered pretty well in the last years. Thanks to that, multipl... Read on →
Imagine that you are working on a large legacy application that also contains the dreaded ActiveRecord callbacks in the models handling most of the business logic. At some point, and under a certain level complexity, ... Read on →
In the first part of this series, we were exploring some potential options for communication between services - what their advantages and disadvantages are, why HTTP API is not necessarily the best possible choice and... Read on →
In the first part of this series, we were exploring some potential options for communication between services - what their advantages and disadvantages are, why HTTP API is not necessarily the best possible choice and... Read on →
Microservices, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and in general, distributed ecosystems, have been on hype in the last several years. And that’s for a good reason! At certain point, The Majestic Monolith “pattern” m... Read on →
In the typical Rails application, you can find the most of the validations in the ActiveRecord models, which is nothing surprising - ActiveRecord models are used for multiple things. Whether it is a good thing, or a b... Read on →
Adding consents for accepting Terms of Service/Privacy Policies must have been a top popular feature in the majority of the applications due to enforcement of GDPR in May ;). From the technical aspects that GDPR requi... Read on →
Few months ago I wrote a blog post about ActiveRecord before_validation callback and how it is used for wrong reasons and concluded that in most cases this is not something we should be using routinely. However, I mi... Read on →
It’s nothing new that ActiveRecord callbacks are abused in many projects and used for the wrong reasons for many use cases where they can be easily avoided in favor of a much better alternative, like service objects. ... Read on →
Object#try is quite a commonly used method in Rails applications to cover cases where there is a possibility of dealing with a nil value or to provide flexible interface for handling cases where some kind of object do... Read on →
Executing background jobs is quite a common feature in many of the web applications. Switching between different background processing frameworks used to be quite painful as most of them had different API for enqueuin... Read on →
Have you ever wondered how it is possible that calling class methods on mailers work in Rails, even though you only define some instance methods in those classes? It seems like it’s quite common question, especially w... Read on →
After publishing recent blog posts about table partitioning - its SQL basics part and how to use in in Rails application I was asked quite a few times what is the real performance gain when using table partitioning. T... Read on →
In the previous blog post we learned some basics about table partitioning: how it works and what kind of problems it solves. So far we've been discussing mostly basic concepts with raw SQL examples. But the essential ... Read on →
You've probably heard many times that the database is the bottleneck of many web applications. This isn't necessarily true. Often it happens that some heavy queries can be substiantially optimized, making them really ... Read on →
If you happen to develop API for non-trivial app with complex business logic beyond CRUD directly mapped to the database tables (i.e. typical Active Record pattern) you were probably wondering many times how to handle... Read on →
Having some kind of type attribute in your models is a pretty common thing, especially in applications with more complex domain. How do you handle such cases? Is it with multiple conditionals / case statements in ever... Read on →
You are working currently on that awesome app and just started thinking about implementing new feature, let's call it feature X. What's the first thing you do? Rolling your own solution or... maybe checking if there's... Read on →