In this episode of Running in Production, Nick Savrov goes over building a
platform to help content creators build a business with Ruby on Rails. It’s
hosted on Heroku and has been up and running in production since 2014.

Nick talks about supporting 6.5 million users, using Turbolinks, having a 19
developer team working on a monolithic app, sending millions of weekly emails,
storing billions of weekly events, using ShapeUp to help manage the project and
much more.

Topics Include

• 2:49 – They support 6.5 million users on the platform which helped creators make $100m+


• 4:19 – There’s 2 parts to the system, the admin for creators and the user experience


• 8:49 – BREAKING NEWS: Rails can scale and it’s working out nicely for them as a monolith


• 10:47 – Turbolinks and Liquid helped their app a lot


• 14:10 – It feels like a Rails app but uses VueJS and InertiaJS on the front-end


• 18:47 – A couple of interesting gems in their Gemfile, including using Fastly


• 21:38 – They have a great relationship with Mux for streaming video


• 25:25 – Approaching the latest stable version of Rails


• 27:05 – 19 Rails engineers are working on the monolithic code base


• 28:33 – Payments are supported with Stripe, PayPal and Authorize.net


• 31:42 – About 10 million emails are sent out every week through SendGrid


• 34:29 – Custom domains for customers and using Heroku with nginx / Let’s Encrypt


• 39:51 – Postgres is the main database along with ClickHouse (billions of events a week)


• 42:33 – What types of events are being logged and how can it be viewed?


• 46:20 – A custom nginx router that sits in front of Heroku


• 50:11 – Reasons for using Heroku and setting up an auto-scaler


• 54:51 – A couple of Heroku add-ons and using New Relic (NOTE: 10 billion rows = 250GB)


• 57:38 – The deployment process from dev to prod (CI, code reviews, GitHub discussions)


• 1:07:57 – What is ShapeUp which is Basecamp’s methodology around project management


• 1:09:06 – Backing up user data and more info about ClickHouse


• 1:14:51 – There’s value in performing soft deletes as long as you really delete it later


• 1:16:03 – OpsGenie, New Relic and Uptime Robot are used for alerting and being on-call


• 1:22:34 – Best tips? Follow standards when you can such as using built in Rails features


• 1:26:03 – You can find Nick on GitHub and Telegram

Links

📄 References

• http://railscasts.com/


• https://youtu.be/KJVTM7mE1Cc?t=600 (RailsConf 2015 “Backpack” reference)


• https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/31-mux-is-an-api-based-platform-that-lets-you-process-and-stream-videos


• https://basecamp.com/shapeup


• https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/12-learn-ruby-on-rails-through-screencast-tutorials-on-gorails

⚙️ Tech Stack

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