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, in BookingSync, we were performing a migration from Karafka 1.4 to 2.0, which we use for communication with Kafka. One of the great features available in version 1.4 was a custom partition assignment strateg... 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 →
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 →
Imagine that you are building a separate application for your e-commerce system dedicated to business intelligence. In other words, you want to calculate some stats for the orders. So you are going to create some new ... Read on →
This is the fourth and also the last part of the Kafka For Rubyists mini course. If you are interested in other parts of the course, please check them out here. Read on →
This is the third part of the Kafka For Rubyists mini course. If you are interested in other parts of the course, please check them out here. Read on →
This is the second part of the Kafka For Rubyists mini course. If you are interested in other parts of the course, please check them out here. Read on →
This is the first part of the Kafka For Rubyists mini course. If you are interested in other parts of the course, please check them out here. Read on →
I’ve been recently planning to record a couple of tutorials for my team in BookingSync, focusing mostly on monitoring and some other more advanced aspects of Kafka and Karafka. But if I was already recording something... 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 →
It is sometimes required for the methods with optional arguments to be able to differentiate between its default value and the value passed from the caller. Passing nil might initially sound like a good idea since it ... Read on →
Imagine that you are implementing some form object because you are fed up with treating ActiveRecord models as such, and you need some extra flexibility. You start with a straightforward implementation for a base clas... 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 →
If you’ve ever worked with JavaScript, especially in pre-SPA/pre-frameworks era with just jQuery, you probably had a chance to see an “exotic” maths in action that looks similar to this: 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 →
Ruby has quite a lot of “exotic” features that are not used that often, but when you need to utilize some metaprogramming magic, you can easily take advantage of them. One of such features is Object.instance_exec whic... Read on →
Recently, I’ve had quite a popular problem to solve: count the occurences of the given item in a collection. There are few ways to solve this problem - starting from using Enumerable#inject or Enumerable#each_with_obj... 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 →
In the majority of the Rails applications or even Ruby gems you can find a lot of use cases where you need to memoize a result of some computation for performance benefits and to not compute it again if this result ha... 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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →