GitHub

When starting a new company and building a new product w/ limited engineering we chose to optimize for expertise and rapid development, landing on Rails API, w/ AngularJS on the front.

The reality is that we're building a CRUD app, so we considered going w/ vanilla Rails MVC to optimize velocity early on (it may not be sexy, but it gets the job done). Instead, we opted to split the codebase to allow for a richer front-end experience, focus on skill specificity when hiring, and give us the flexibility to be consumed by multiple clients in the future.

We also considered .NET core or Node.js for the API layer, and React on the front-end, but our experiences dealing with mature Node APIs and the rapid-fire changes that comes with state management in React-land put us off, given our level of experience with those tools.

We're using GitHub and Trello to track issues and projects, and a plethora of other tools to help the operational team, like Zapier, Mailchimp, Google Drive with some basic Vue.js & HTML5 apps for smaller internal-facing web projects.

Releasing new versions of our services is done by Travis CI. Travis first runs our test suite. Once it passes, it publishes a new release binary to GitHub.

Common tasks such as installing dependencies for the Golang project, or building a binary are automated using plain old Makefiles. (We know, crazy old school, right?) Our binaries are compressed using UPX.

Travis has come a long way over the past years. I used to prefer Jenkins in some cases since it was easier to debug broken builds. With the addition of the aptly named “debug build” button, Travis is now the clear winner. It’s easy to use and free for open source, with no need to maintain anything.

#ContinuousIntegration #CodeCollaborationVersionControl

When we've gone through code reviews (every code and config change goes through a code review) and feel good about the level of automated testing (no one can sign off on their own code's functionality; a quality assurance engineer or other developer has to verify functionality), we merge our changes via a bot that interacts with GitHub (the bot maintains our versions and change logs). After Buildkite has a green build and our binary is shipped to our repo servers, we are good to roll out deploys to our data centers and to keep pushing the needle on the performance of our system.

#Languages #DataStores #Databases #InMemoryDatabases

The core Shopify app has remained a Rails monolith, but we also have hundreds of other Rails apps across the organization. These are not microservices, but domain-specific apps: Shipping (talks with various shipping providers), Identity (single sign on across all Shopify stores), and App Store to name a few. Managing a hundred apps and keeping them up to date with security updates can be tough, so we've developed ServicesDB, an internal app that keeps track of all production services and helps developers to make sure that they don't miss anything important.

ServicesDB keeps a checklist for each app: ownership, uptime, logs, on-call rotation, exception reporting, and gem security updates. If there are problems with any of those, ServicesDB opens a GitHub issue and pings owners of the app to ask them to address it. ServicesDB also makes it easy to query the infrastructure and answer questions like, “How many apps are on Rails 4.2? How many apps are using an outdated version of gem X? Which apps are calling this service?”.

I use GitLab when building side-projects and MVPs. The interface and interactions are close enough to those of GitHub to prevent cognitive switching costs between professional and personal projects hosted on different services.

GitLab also provides a suite of tools including issue/project management, CI/CD with GitLab CI, and validation/landing pages with GitLab Pages. With everything in one place, on an #OpenSourceCloud GitLab makes it easy for me to manage much larger projects on my own, than would be possible with other solutions or tools.

It's petty I know, but I can also read the GitLab code diffs far more easily than diffs on GitHub or Bitbucket...they just look better in my opinion.