May 18, 2018 · 1 minute read
Ever gone to look at logs to investigate a bug reported by a user? Ever looked at your logs and had no idea what that user was doing?
Better logging to the rescue!
Rails’ config supports log_tags, which has some built in options such as subdomain and request_id but it also supports arbitrary procs.
The below config put into config/application.rb will produce logs with added tags (assuming your user_id is stored on the session):
Read On →
Feb 19, 2018 · 4 minute read
Have you gotten your MVP out the door? Congrats! Now are you wondering what your users are doing and how well it’s working? It’s time for analytics and marketing automation!
This post will go through an opinionated minimum viable marketing automation stack in Ruby. The goal is to take an existing funnel, instrument it with events, track how it’s going, and then use email automation to improve conversion rates.
Read On →
Oct 1, 2017 · 4 minute read
This post originally appeared on BackerKit’s Blog.
Many web applications have the need to send links to users that allow the user to perform an action without logging in. Examples include password reset and confirming an email address. These links need to embed some kind of identifying information so the server can discern which user is performing the action. If the action is sensitive, the link should also include some amount of obfuscation so the URLs cannot be guessed or generated by nefarious actors.
Read On →
Jul 26, 2017 · 3 minute read
This post originally appeared on BackerKit’s Blog.
In a previous post we explored how our application tracks sent emails. We set things up to update or insert a record for each email with the current state (delivered, dropped, etc). In this post we’ll look at an alternative data model where we’ll store each event as its own record and then roll up the events to get the current state of a particular email.
Read On →
Jul 8, 2017 · 3 minute read
This post originally appeared on BackerKit’s Blog.
Heroku makes it dead simple to deploy and operate apps; Docker makes it even easier! Heroku has a Docker runtime in beta.
This article will review how to setup a simple Ruby app to build and deploy as a Docker container on Heroku using CircleCI.
The app we’ll be using We run a dashboard for internal use with a range of widgets that give us data about various events in the company and application.
Read On →
Jun 4, 2017 · 1 minute read
Our application is driven by calls to action delivered to project backers via email. We send ~2 million emails a month with 98%+ deliverability.
Given the important role email plays in our business, we wanted to have better technical and behavioral insights into what was going on with our sent emails. We wanted to know more about our email at the project and backer level as well as what kind of impacts our emails have on conversion rates.
Read On →
May 7, 2017 · 1 minute read
At BackerKit, we occasionally see high volumes of traffic from malicious clients. (Kickstarter has faced a similar problem.) These DDoS attacks result in degraded performance and frustrate our customers. Not cool!
We implemented Kickstarter’s Rack::Attack and configured constraints on the number of requests allowed in a time period based on IP address on our troublesome endpoints. Yay, problem solved!
Like most tools, Rack::Attack requires tuning; our initial stab at configuration led to customers being blocked.
Read On →
Oct 31, 2016 · 5 minute read
I recently migrated this blog (built using Hugo) from a manually configured setup with S3 and CloudFront to the same infrastructure managed via Terraform. While it’s relatively trivial to host a static site on AWS these days, migrating this simple application to be managed with Terraform was a great way to get started with HashiCorp’s infrastructure automation tools.
This post will lay out the steps for deploying a static site on AWS via Terraform and some of the gotchas of migrating an existing site.
Read On →
Oct 26, 2016 · 2 minute read
I’ve been working on projects recently that make heavy use of the repository pattern. I frequently wonder if the added layer of abstraction is worth the indirection and I’ve found there is a large continuum between writing large queries in controllers and abstracting all the way to repositories.
What is a repository anyway? Martin Fowler defines a repository as
[a layer of abstraction that] mediates between the domain and the data mapping layers
Read On →
Sep 25, 2016 · 5 minute read
On a project recently, we were debugging a slow user experience during file upload and after investigating, found that the culprit was mainly our queue configuration. We were using Amazon’s Simple Queue Service (SQS) for queueing and this post goes over our debugging process and the lessons learned for tuning SQS along with some more general take aways about background jobs and queue design.
Our use case The user flow in question here is a contract signing flow where the user uploads a file to be prepared for signing.
Read On →