Ruby Rogues

Latest Episodes:

RR 379: "Caching in Rails" with Jeff Kreeftmeijer Sep 11, 2018

Show notes

Panel:
- Charles Max Wood
- Dave Kimura
- Eric Berry
Special Guests: https://jeffkreeftmeijer.com In this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panel talks to https://jeffkreeftmeijer.com who is a Ruby and Elixir developer at https://appsignal.com. Jeff writes for the https://appsignal.com newsletter and has a blog. Check out today’s episode where the panel talks about AppSignal, Russian doll caching, Drifting Ruby, JavaScript Sprinkles, cache warming, N+1 plus other topics.Show Topics:2:47 – Code Fund & https://newrelic.com/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIpbDg_MSz3QIVAhtpCh2qpgebEAAYASAAEgJnivD_BwE&utm_campaign=googlebrand+JM+ABM+Q1FY19+acq+NORAM&utm_medium=PS&utm_source=Google 3:40 – https://appsignal.com might be the only support for https://elixir-lang.org.4:12 – The integration, the ease was so simple and your (Jeff) documentation made it very easy.4:46 – Comparatively to New Relic, https://appsignal.com is cheaper, isn’t it?4:59 – We don’t charge for host, we charge per request. That’s where to difference in price comes from. You get a number of requests in your plan. https://appsignal.com – you pay for what you use.5:50 – Chuck has used New Relic in the past, but only pay for the month that he needs.6:07 – Panelist talks with Josh Adams and relays the conversation to the panel and the guest.6:48 – Eric to Dave: Do you run into this with https://www.driftingruby.com? Where people just pay for what they need and cancel afterwards.7:41 – Dave: Yes, I do come across this. There isn’t much you can do about it. People will do what they need to do.8:24 – Jeff: We don’t have a lot of this problem with https://appsignal.com. By the way, I have never done that before – you are all horrible! ☺9:02 – Chuck: Let’s dive into is what is your approach to performance on Rails?9:24 – We started the vlog series to help them with that. Sometimes you run into limits of what Ruby can do, and stuff like caching can help. It’s never really a single issue. That’s one of our challenges as a company to hook into everything (integration). We do support, per communication, to help with tech issues, but usually it’s set-up related. Everybody’s problems are different because everyone’s set-up is different.11:02 – Chuck: Most of these posts are about caching and other topics. I’m going to go to something that I misunderstood for a while and that is https://blog.appsignal.com/2018/04/03/russian-doll-caching-in-rails.html I didn’t quite make the connection in my head.11:40 – First, let’s talk about fragment caching.13:49 – Jeff explains https://blog.appsignal.com/2018/04/03/russian-doll-caching-in-rails.html 18:44 – Chuck makes comments and asks Jeff a question.19:43 – Jeff confirms the panelist’s answer.22:00 – Jeff: Another solution is https://github.com/avand/sprinkles 22:27 – Digital Ocean’s Advertisement.23:12 – Question from Chuck to Jeff.23:38 – Chuck talks about what he will discuss at the Summit conference in October.23:55 – Panelist has had experience with https://blog.appsignal.com/2018/04/03/russian-doll-caching-in-rails.html. Performance can be smoke in mirrors. Application he worked on before, we did tons of caching (query caching, https://blog.appsignal.com/2018/04/03/russian-doll-caching-in-rails.html, and others) it was all about handling the cache key.25:32 – More comments about caching from another panelist. https://www.section.io/blog/what-is-cache-warming/ is mentioned, too.26:46 – How do you utilize https://www.section.io/blog/what-is-cache-warming/?27:39 – Chuck asks a question.27:44 – Question answered.28:12 – Does something like this exist for http://www.phoenixsoftware.com/ode.htm?28:28 – Jeff: I don’t think there is something like that for http://www.phoenixsoftware.com/ode.htm.28:50 – Chuck: When do you want to use one caching over another caching?29:09 – Jeff: “Depends on a couple of things. https://blog.appsignal.com/2018/04/24/active-record-performance-the-n+1-queries-antipattern.html is a feature and that you “should” rely on https://blog.appsignal.com/2018/04/03/russian-doll-caching-in-rails.html, and generally that is not an accepted thing. You could do that, but that is applied to a specific thing. What do you guys think?”30:31 – Panelist: Rendering partials is an expensive endeavor.31:38 – This topic continues between panelists and Jeff.32:25 – Jeff: Fragment caching is a good fit for that.32:56 – Question: You have a blog, one of your posts that you talk about you discuss open source projects maintainable. Talk to me how that led you to write it?33:32 – Jeff: Three things you should not do, based on mistakes that I made in the past.1.) https://github.com/jeffkreeftmeijer/navvy – had adapters for everything.2.) Dropping support for older visions of your dependencies.3.) Hand over projects if you can’t help anymore.This whole article is based on me messing up.35:07 – Chuck makes some comments.35:27 – Panelist: Ran into a problem the other day, there is a dependency that hasn’t been updated in over a year. They are waiting to solve all issues. I submitted an issue to be resolved.37:02 – https://blog.appsignal.com/2018/04/24/active-record-performance-the-n+1-queries-antipattern.html – is it a bug or a feature?37:12 – If you do nothing with it then it is a bug.37:21 – Chuck: to me a bug is an issue. It’s not a bug it’s inefficiency unless you turn it into something else.37:42 – Jeff: https://blog.appsignal.com/2018/04/24/active-record-performance-the-n+1-queries-antipattern.html is an undesirable feature? It’s not necessarily a bug. You need a very reliable caching layer.38:25 – Chuck: What is a very reliable caching layer?38:38 – Jeff answers the question.40:50 – https://redis.io is mentioned.42:04 – Jeff (guest) comments on the panelists’ thoughts.42:37 – Picks?42:57 – https://devchat.tv/get-a-coder-job/ 43:34 – PicksLinks:
- https://devchat.tv/get-a-coder-job/
- https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/
- https://www.javascript.com
- http://www.phoenixsoftware.com/ode.htm
- https://appsignal.com
- https://blog.appsignal.com/2018/04/03/russian-doll-caching-in-rails.html
- https://github.com/avand/sprinkles
- https://www.section.io/blog/what-is-cache-warming/
- https://blog.appsignal.com/2018/04/24/active-record-performance-the-n+1-queries-antipattern.html
- https://redis.io
- https://blog.appsignal.com/2018/03/20/fragment-caching-in-rails.html
- https://github.com/thekompanee/fuubar
- https://github.com/jeffkreeftmeijer/navvy
- http://asciidoc.org
- https://asciidoctor.org
- https://meetme.so/ElixirMix
- https://newrelic.com/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIpbDg_MSz3QIVAhtpCh2qpgebEAAYASAAEgJnivD_BwE&utm_campaign=googlebrand+JM+ABM+Q1FY19+acq+NORAM&utm_medium=PS&utm_source=Google
- https://elixir-lang.org
-
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RR 378: Ruby performance: MJIT with John Hawthorn Sep 04, 2018

Show notes

Panel:

Charles Max Wood
David Richards
Dave Kimura
Eric Berry

Special Guests: John HawthornIn this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panel talks to John Hawthorn about MJIT. John has been a Ruby programmer for about 9 years and is based in Victoria, B.C. They talk about what MJIT is, the effects you can see from using the MJIT compiler, and why the JIT doesn’t always work with other languages. They also touch on how you can use the JIT in your own code, how he makes his performance better, and more!Show Topics:1:36 – John is a Ruby programmer, and has been one for the past 9 years, and he is based out of Victoria, B.C.5:00 – He had always been curious how a JIT would work and found that it was always too difficult to work with. Since discovering MJIT, he has been able to work with these compilers because he understands how to work with C code.7:36 – Ruby has a bytecode and it looks a lot like an assembly language, which is approachable to a Rubyist.8:24 – The core of MJIT is an ERB template which take this bytecode, loops over it, and emits C code.9:01 – Effects that you can seem from the JIT in your own code is that it uses a really tight math loop, making your code faster.11:25 – Other languages aren’t suited for compilers like JIT because they are so flexible to begin with. And in some cases, it doesn’t make sense to JIT compile.13:05 – The compiled code now is not reusable by other workers and works better with one compilation per process.15:20 – The temp folder gets cleared immediately after its run, but this compiled code is probably going to stay in memory forever.17:30 – The MJIT doesn’t work as well with Rails because the code can’t get warmed up enough. Some things aren’t friendly to a JIT.20:24 – If someone wants to play with the JIT, as long as you have any Ruby version manager, install any of the previewed releases of 2.6 and then run with --jit.21:44 – Online, you can look into following people who have written various Ruby libraries to look at performance. You can look at people like Sam Saffron and Julia Evans.23:57 –TruffleRuby is a new front-end on top of a mature virtual machine whereas MJIT is a brand new virtual machine on top of a Ruby front-end.27:57 – The MJIT had no effect on his work, it was just really fun and interesting to look into.28:29 – To make his performance better, he allocates fewer objects, does less loops, and writes better queries.29:02 – You want to run a profiler that will give you a better idea of where to look for performance issues, but you really need a proper benchmark to say what is wrong with your performance. A great benchmark you can use is benchmark-ips.31:59 – The “gotcha” of doing this kind of work is verifying that you’ve actually improved it.33:41 – Before we have the JIT in production, we are going to be using these techniques to find out if the JIT is helping us.Links:

Sponsors

Picks:Charles

Dave

David

Stephen Fry in America

Eric

John

Special Guest: John Hawthorn.
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RR 377: Upgrading a Rails application incrementally with Luke Francl Aug 28, 2018

Show notes

Panel:

Dave Kimura
Eric Berry

Special Guests: Luke FranclIn this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panel talks to Luke Francl about his article “Upgrading Rails applications incrementally”. Luke works at GitHub on search and has been there since October 2017. Before working at GitHub, he worked at a search startup that was working with Rails and Elasticsearch. They talk about things that people take for granted with search, the impending takeover of GitHub from Microsoft, and what open source looks like today. They also touch on the process of getting hired at GitHub, his process for upgrading Rails applications, and more!In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

Luke intro
Working with Rails and Elasticsearch
Why he decided to come to GitHub
Surreal working at GitHub
What are some of the things that people take for granted with search?
What people expect from search
Wordpress
GitHub has been very focused on the Microsoft deal recently
Code Sponsor
GitHub/Microsoft owns open source
Open source today
Kubernetes
The GitHub office
What was the process like of getting hired at GitHub?
Build a Query Parser blog post
Using his search experience
Rails incremental upgrades
His process of upgrading Rails applications
Upgrading a Rails application incrementally
Short vs long upgrading process
Rails is fairly compatible between versions
And much, much more!

Links:

Sponsors

Picks:Dave

Screenflow
LED Lightbulbs

Eric

Navicat Essentials

Luke

Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann

Special Guest: Luke Francl.
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Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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RR 376: "Ruby Performance" with Nate Berkopec Aug 21, 2018

Show notes

Panel:

Charles Max Wood
Eric Berry
David Richards

Special Guests: Nate BerkopecIn this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panel talks to Nate Berkopec about Ruby Performance. Nate is a freelance Ruby performance consultant and he writes and works on Ruby application performance, specifically Rails applications, which he has been doing for the past 3 or 4 years. They talk about his past experience, what led him to Ruby performance, and why he loves Turbolinks. They also touch on the two benefits to performance work, if Ruby performance on the back-end really matters for the majority of cases, and more!In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

Nate intro
Ruby and Rails
Was on Shark Tank
What led you into Ruby performance?
Always enjoyed the easily quantified parts of development
Performance work is very cut and dry
Why do you love Turbolinks?
100ms to Glass with Rails and Turbolinks – Turbolinks article
The beauty of Turbolinks
The Complete Guide to Rails Performance
The two benefits to performance work
Making things scalable and back-end
End-user experience
Compiling JavaScript
Does Ruby performance on the back-end really matter for the majority of cases?
Making the experience feel faster
Search
Admin actions
What would you do when you have a N+1 query problem?
Finding a N+1 and fixing it on the back-end
How he fixes an N+1
Bullet gem
And much, much more!

Links:

Sponsors

Picks:Charles

Eric

David

Nate

Special Guest: Nate Berkopec.
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Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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RR 375: "How to Contribute to Ruby" with Sihui Huang Aug 14, 2018

Show notes

Panel:

Eric Berry

Special Guests: Sihui HuangIn this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panel talks to Sihui Huang about his article "How to Contribute to Ruby." Sihui is currently a back-end engineer at Gusto, which is a startup that works with payroll, benefits, and HR for companies. They talk about her experience in the programming world, why she chose to work with Ruby, and they touch on her article and why she decided to write it. They also touch on the three focuses for Ruby 3, if she thinks Ruby has a long time future, and more!In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

Sihui intro
Back-end engineer at Gusto
Working with Rails and Ruby
How old is the app?
How long have you been programming in Ruby?
Why Ruby?
Working with Ruby is like talking to a friend
"How to Contribute to Ruby"
What is your experience with Mats?
Try to keep decision making as open as possible
The three focuses for Ruby 3
How Ruby is trying to achieve concurrency
Room for improvement
Do you see Ruby having a long time future?
Ruby is not going anywhere
The philosophy of having a small team
The assumption that you need a big team to have a big company
Tooling
Many core contributors don’t use Ruby themselves
Enjoying the language
Type checking
What benefits come from type checking?
Compilers to detect errors
And much, much more!

Links:

Sponsors

Picks:Eric

Sihui

Special Guest: Sihui Huang.
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/ruby-rogues--6102073/support.

RR 374: Ruby 2.5 Enumerable Predicates Accept Pattern Argument WITH Prathamesh Sonpatki Aug 07, 2018

Show notes

Panel:

Charles Max Wood
David Richards
Eric Berry
Dave Kimura

Special Guests: Prathamesh SonpatkiIn this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panel talks to Prathamesh Sonpatki about Rails 5. Prathamesh works for BigBinary, where they publish a lot of blog posts on things like Ruby, speaks at conferences and is the organizer of RubyConf India. They talk about the biggest changes that have occurred from the new Rails 5 release, CISM tests, and the struggle that testing brings. They also touch on different testing approaches, especially in Rails 5, Capybara tests, and more!In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

Prathamesh intro
What have you been doing with Rails 5?
What have you been digging into with testing and features within Rails 5?
Major changes with testing scenarios
More focus on end-to-end testing
Old issues fixed
Unit testing in Rails
Refactoring on database cleaning
CISM tests
Cypress
Exploring with Cypress and issues with it
capybara-webkit
Hating testing
Mike Moore talk reference
Testing across the board integration
Using JavaScript in the front-end
End-to-end testing makes more sense in some situations
What’s your testing approach for Rails 5 applications?
Functional load tests
Capybara level tests
Service object tests
And much, much more!

Links:

Sponsors

Picks:Charles

Writing code for fun
Notion.so
Chuck@DevChat.tv

Eric

thehotline.org
1 (800) 799-SAFE (7233)

Dave

Prathamesh

Special Guest: Prathamesh Sonpatki.
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Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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RR 373: Super Good Software/Stembolt Technologies - Understanding Your Production Apps with Jared Norman Jul 31, 2018

Show notes

Panel:

Charles Max Wood
David Richards
Eric Berry
Catherine Meyers
Dave Kimura

Special Guests: Jared NormanIn this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panel talks to Jared Norman about understanding your production apps. Jared has been programming since he was about 10 years old and for the past 7 years, he has been doing Ruby. These days, he runs a consultancy company called Super Good Software doing Ruby on Rails stuff and mostly eCommerce. They talk about his article You Can’t Save Everyone: Some Exceptions Should Be Left Alone, when capturing exceptions is the right way to go, developing with good visibility in mind, and more!In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

Jared intro
Founder of Super Good Software
Article - You Can’t Save Everyone: Some Exceptions Should Be Left Alone
Solidus and Spree
Rescue_from Exception
Injecting special error reporting
Don’t necessarily want to rescue all exceptions
Injecting an error reporting tool
Trying to think of a good reason to rescue_from exception
Loss of visibility
Exceptional Ruby by Avdi Grimm
Ruby Rogues Episode 19
When is capturing exceptions the right way to go?
Using an exception when something is legitimately broken
project-honeypot
When exceptions are in a state that you don’t expect
Having enough information to attack problems when they arise
Dig method for hashes
Elegance of Ruby that allows you to not work as hard
Developing code for better exception handling
Developing with visibility in mind
And much, much more!

Links:

Sponsors

Picks:Charles

Eric

'Resting bitch face' is real, scientists say – CNN article

David

Basin and Range by John McPhee

Catherine

Scott’s Cheap Flights

Dave

Jared

Special Guest: Jared Norman.
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Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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RR 372: Hiring with Mindaugas Mozūras Jul 24, 2018

Show notes

Panel:

Charles Max Wood
David Richards
Eric Berry
Catherine Meyers

Special Guests: Mindaugas MozūrasIn this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panel talks to Mindaugas Mozūras about hiring. Mindaugas is from Lithaunia and has worked at Vinted for the past 6 years, starting as a software developer and is now is the head of engineering there. They talk about why it’s hard to find great developers to hire, the importance of hiring both junior and senior developers, and his blog post A User Guide to Me. They also touch on how you come about writing up job roles, the importance of letting developers think outside of the box, and more!In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

Mindaugas intro
Is it different to hire in Lithuania?
It’s not easy to find great developers
Why is it so hard to find good developers?
Are there programming boot-camps in Lithuania?
Having the resources to train new developers
Hiring a balance between junior and senior developers
Junior developers VS senior developers
Fear of hiring junior developers
A USER GUIDE TO ME blog post
Why did you write this?
How to Rands
Communication
How do you write up job roles?
Figuring out what you need
How they write up job ads differently at Vinted
Weekly one-on-ones and quarterly reviews
Allowing people to be who they are and fit openly into the company
Not forcing people to fit inside a certain “box”
And much, much more!

Links:

Sponsors

Picks:Charles

Sit down and write code
Take a minute for yourself

Eric

David

Catherine

Mindaugas

Special Guest: Mindaugas Mozūras.
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/ruby-rogues--6102073/support.

RR 371: The Modular Monolith: Rails Architecture with Dan Manges Jul 17, 2018

Show notes

Panel:

David Richards
Dave Kimura
Catherine Meyers

Special Guests: Dan MangesIn this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panel talks to Dan Manges about his blog post entitled The Modular Monolith: Rails Architecture. Dan is the CTO of Root, which is a car insurance carrier in Columbus, Ohio. They started the company a few years ago because they felt that the prices people pay for car insurance should be based primarily on diving behavior and not demographics. They talk about how he built the architecture of the app for his company, what a Modular Monolith is, their different gems, and more!In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

Dan intro
CTO and Co-Founder of Root
Tracking driving habits of users to determine rate
Ruby on Rails
Architecture of the app
Back-end platform in Rails
Mobile as the primary interface
See the app in the Google Play and iTunes stores
Current direction for the company
Identify good architectural boundaries in the code base
Monoliths
What is Modular Monolith?
Why did you decide not to go the microservices route?
Microservices introduce tradeoffs in your efficiency of making changes
Not having a too fragmented back-end platform
Do you have one large schema?
Maintaining productivity
Engines
Separate integration tests
Integration tests between various components
Their rating engine
Deployments
His article: The Modular Monolith: Rails Architecture
Highly recommends their modular monolith
Everything is in one codebase
And much, much more!

Links:

Sponsors

Picks:Dave

The IT Crowd

David

Pay attention to how you’re hiring
Atlas of a Lost World by Craig Childs

Catherine

Breaking Into Startups Podcast

Dan

Postico

Special Guest: Dan Manges.
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RR 370: How I Built Timeasure with Eliav Lavi Jul 10, 2018

Show notes

Panel:

David Richards
Dave Kimura
Eric Berry
Catherine Meyers

Special Guests: Eliav LaviIn this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panel talks to Eliav Lavi about his article How I Built Timeasure. Eliav works for Riskified where he is a back-end developer working with Ruby mostly and recently some Scala. In the past, he studied music but had always been into technology from a young age. They talk about how got to where he is today, what the developer scene is like in Israel, and Timeasure. They talk about what this gem is, why they decided to create it, and more!In particular, we dive pretty deep on: