In this episode of Running in Production, Chad Wilken goes over building
a service to help contractors document their job and communicate with their
crew. It’s been up since 2014.

Chad talks about handling ~800k photo uploads per day, building a Rails API
driven app, creating a great mobile experience with React Native, handling
millions of daily Sidekiq (pro) jobs, transitioning to AWS ECS with Fargate,
deploying with Capistrano and so much more.

Topics Include

• 3:04 – Motivation for switching from .NET to Rails


• 5:59 – It’s a Rails API with a React front-end, first class mobile support is important


• 9:34 – What type of screens does this app have?


• 11:58 – As the CTO, Chad doesn’t get a chance to code as much as he used to


• 13:15 – A few Rails features and gems being used (interactor, wisper and more)


• 16:35 – Third party sites that they integrate with


• 18:11 – Contracting companies are a lot more technical than you might think


• 22:39 – Every photo upload hits the Rails back-end but it’s not processed there


• 25:30 – Millions of jobs are being run through Sidekiq per day and payments


• 28:46 – Spending time on the company admin back-end vs user features


• 33:20 – Postgres (RDS), MongoDB, Elasticsearch and Redis are being used


• 36:13 – The Flipper gem is being used for feature flags


• 37:44 – Docker is being used in development with a transition to using them in production


• 39:30 – How things are currently deployed and where they’re going with AWS Fargate


• 41:03 – From Chef to Ansible with Capistrano handling app deployments


• 43:35 – Ubuntu is their distro of choice


• 44:00 – Moving over to ECS with Fargate and hiring dedicated ops folks


• 48:28 – A run down of which AWS resources they’re using


• 49:25 – The deployment process from development to production


• 54:59 – All developers on the team can use whichever OS they prefer


• 55:37 – Handling backups of all user data


• 58:22 – Logging, error monitoring and alerts


• 1:01:40 – Best tips? Design patterns are important, so is caching and saying no


• 1:03:48 – Their AWS bill is about $38,000 a month


• 1:05:03 – Check out https://companycam.com, they’re hiring!

Links

📄 References

• https://readme.com/


• https://buildbot.net/

⚙️ Tech Stack

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