In this episode of Running in Production, CJ Avilla goes over building
a fund raising platform with Ruby on Rails. It’s hosted on Heroku and has been
running in production since 2015.

CJ talks about rewriting an app with Rails, processing $30 million dollars of
donations, using Stripe, maintaining a Rails 4.2 app, carefully sending out
bulk emails, ensuring good tests are written, keeping things simple and more.

Topics Include

• 2:26 – Rebuilding a similar app with a new tech stack is easier the 2nd time around


• 6:14 – Motivation for using Rails and live coding features right next to his client


• 9:33 – What the app does at a high level and what some of the screens do


• 12:20 – The app is running Rails 4.2 and it’s humming along with minimal maintenance


• 13:29 – Stripe handles accepting donations and keeping things as simple as possible


• 17:33 – Processing over $30 million dollars since the site went live


• 22:35 – It’s worth checking out which payment providers are available in different countries


• 24:51 – Using an older version of Stripe’s API but it’s super stable


• 27:22 – A couple of gems from 2015 which helped build this app


• 28:50 – (1) standard Heroku Dyno for the web app and (1) 2x size Dyno for the worker


• 32:15 – Postgres, Redis and Resque are being used along with Heroku’s cron scheduler


• 35:48 – Sending bulk emails out can be scary


• 39:42 – Using Rbenv locally to manage things in development


• 42:42 – The reasons for picking Heroku were mainly to avoid any type of ops work


• 46:03 – What it’s like to develop a new feature and push it up to production


• 47:58 – Not doing traditional TDD but tests are still written


• 51:18 – Heroku is in charge of performing daily database backups


• 55:40 – Handling background worker spikes with popular donation pages


• 57:42 – Tagging the current user in Rollbar errors and then emailing customers ASAP


• 1:00:27 – Best tips? Keeping it simple really drives down your maintenance


• 1:02:38 – CJ’s has a YouTube channel and a personal site at https://cjav.dev

Links

📄 References

• https://www.youtube.com/CJAvilla


• https://stripe.com/payments/checkout


• https://stripe.com/docs/payments/payment-element


• https://faye.jcoglan.com/node.html

⚙️ Tech Stack

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