uscreen Is a Platform That Helps Content Creators Build a Business

Running in Production

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

• rails →
• ruby →
• vue →
• authorize-net →
• clickhouse →
• digitalocean →
• fastly →
• heroku →
• kafka →
• lets-encrypt →
• mux →
• new-relic →
• nginx →
• opsgenie →
• paypal →
• postgres →
• redis →
• sendgrid →
• sentry →
• stripe →
• turbolinks →
• uptime-robot →
• webpack →

🛠 Libraries Used

• https://github.com/Shopify/liquid
• https://github.com/inertiajs/inertia
• https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq
• https://github.com/PNixx/clickhouse-activerecord

Support the Show

This episode does not have a sponsor and this podcast is a labor of love. If you want to support the show, the best way to do it is to purchase one of my courses or suggest one to a friend.

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