In the previous blog post, we covered our story of migrating a giant database of almost 11 TB. Here comes the last part of the series—making Ruby on Rails applications work with RDS Proxy. 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 →
Recently, I’ve had an unfortunate opportunity to deal with a very unexpected issue with Kafka that had quite terrible consequences. The exact origin of the issue is yet to be discovered; nevertheless, the process lead... Read on →
If you’ve ever had a need to implement an audit log to track all the changes that get persisted for all or at least some models in your application, there is a good chance that you’ve encountered PaperTrail gem that m... Read on →
Imagine that you are implementing a payment processing system for the e-commerce system and discover that multiple customers were charged twice for exactly the same order. Ouch… Sounds like a real nightmare to deal wi... 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 →
Optimizing database queries is arguably one of the fastest ways to improve the performance of the Rails applications. There are multiple ways how you can approach it, depending on the kind of a problem. N+1 queries se... 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 →
Touching ActiveRecord models is quite a common thing in most of the Rails applications, especially useful for cache invalidation. By default, it updates updated_at timestamp with the current time, Here’s a typical exa... Read on →
One very useful feature of ActiveRecord is automatically defining attribute readers and writers for all the columns for given tables. For the ones with boolean type, however, there is one more addition - defining an a... 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 →
As hard as it is for me to believe, I already have over 5 years of professional experience in Ruby and Rails. Throughout all these years my attitude towards Rails has been fluctuating between going from blind love to ... Read on →
Rails 5.0 is without a doubt a great release with plenty of useful changes and additions. The most notable change was probably ActionCable - the layer responsible for integrating your app with websockets. However, the... Read on →
Every now and then I discover some features in Rails that are not that (arguably) commonly used, but there are some use cases when they turn out to be super useful and the best tool for the job. One of them would defi... Read on →
I was recently asked what is secret key base used for in Rails applications and why not secure value of it (or even worse - the public one!) creates a security issue. That was a really good question, I remember how it... 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 →
Recently I've been repeatedly asked how to get started with programming, especially Ruby and Rails. To keep things DRY and make sure I always include all great resources for learning, I decided to write this blog post... Read on →
In many Rails applications the modeling is limited only to creating classes inheritng from ActiveRecord::Base which are 1:1 mapped to database tables. Having AR models like User and Project doesn't tell much about the... Read on →
There've been a lot of discussions for several months about "The Rails Way" and problems associated with it - huge models with several thousands lines of code and no distinguishable responsibilities (User class which ... 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 →
Last time, in part 1, I was giving some advice about testing - why to test at all, which tests are valuable and which are not, when to write acceptance tests and in what cases aim for the maximum code coverage. It bro... Read on →
Testing is still one of the hottest topics when it comes to developing maintainable and business-critical applications. Ruby on Rails community embraces the importance of writings tests, yet there are so little resour... Read on →
There’ve been a lot of discussions recently about applying Object Oriented Programming in Rails applications, how ActiveRecord callbacks make testing painful and how Rails makes it hard to do OOP the right way. Is it ... Read on →
Server setup with the entire environment for Rails applications can be quite tricky, especially when you do it for the first time. Here is step by step guide how to setup CentOS 6.4 server with a basic environment for... Read on →