SmartZip

Working with Ruby on Rails also means working with #RubyGems Most of the time, the community has some gems you can use and list down your #Gemfile. But sometimes, you also need to come up with your own proprietary ones to encapsulate and re-use some of your business logic.

It is critical that such repositories and their source code remain private, secure. Even though your code shouldn't contain any credentials, this still applies to your gems' distribution channels. Unless for parts you've willingly open sourced, you don't want your intellectual property stolen.

Rubygems.org therefore, not being an option for this use case, I faced two alternatives: accepting the overhead of maintaining my own gem server, or finding a service that does it for me.

Obviously, the latter was the way to go:

I chose Gemfury for its convenience, pricing model, and reliability.

Gemfury also allowed me/my team to publish gems via different methods: file upload, SSH, HTTPS, or as simple as a Git push.

I was at some point looking for a way to loadtest some of my environments, staging initially, but including production as well, ultimately, to ensure our ability to scale when facing sudden bursts of requests, and understand how it would impact our load balancers, our instances, our database server... etc.

I came across Loader.io , a service by SendGrid labs which not only allowed my team and I to loadtest our API endpoints but also simulate actual user traffic on our website.

#LoadAndPerformanceTesting

Which VideoConferencing software to use?

Join.me, #GoToMeeting, Google, Skype... Many of the previous software I experienced disappointed me or my team in many ways: problems joining, voice/video issues, having to register or install software first. And easily, each time we just waste 10-15mn waiting for everyone to join.

Too many signs it was time for a change.

At my previous company, SmartZip, I made the switch to #UberConference. A Dialpad service. We're currently using Zoom at Stessa. I really like it too.

Achieving #MarketingAutomation using AutopilotHQ

Some of the key aspects evaluated here: - Ability to integrate with Segment or Zapier - Being multi-channel (Not just Email automation) - Dozens of integrations and capabilities: SFDC, In app messages, SMS, Push Notifications, Direct Mail, Segment Events... - Allowing teams to operate outside of engineering dependencies - Segmentation against user attributes / user traits - Static or Dynamic segments - Concept of user journeys - And more

Combined with Segment and its own sets of integrations and capabilities, AutopilotHQ ended up being a very powerful tool for Product Marketing to use at SmartZip.

Couple of years later, there certainly were some overlap with the features offered by Intercom 's engagement module , but our team kept on using this tool given the greater range of functionality / capabilities.

Nexmo vs Twilio ?

Back in the early days at SmartZip Analytics, that evaluation had - for whatever reason - been made by Product Management. Some developers might have been consulted, but we hadn't made the final call and some key engineering aspects of it were omitted.

When revamping the platform, I made sure to flip the decision process how it should be. Business provided an input but Engineering lead the way and has the final say on all implementation matters. My engineers and I decided on re-evaluating the criteria and vendor selection. Not only did we need SMS support, but were we not thinking about #VoiceAndSms support as the use cases evolved.

Also, on an engineering standpoint, SDK mattered. Nexmo didn't have any. Twilio did. No-one would ever want to re-build from scratch integration layers vendors should naturally come up with and provide their customers with.

Twilio won on all fronts. Including costs and implementation timelines. No-one even noticed the vendor switch.

Many years later, Twilio demonstrated its position as a leader by holding conferences in the Bay Area, announcing features like Twilio Functions. Even acquired Authy which we also used for 2FA. Twilio's growth has been amazing. Its recent acquisition of SendGrid continues to show it.

Which #GridFramework to use? My team and I closed on Bootstrap !

On a related note and as far as stylesheets go, we had to chose between #CSS, #SCSS, #Sass , Less Finally opted for Sass

As syntactically awesome as the name announces it.

Use case: Keeping all API endpoints documented.

Swagger UI is slick. Not only details the specifications of all input/output parameters are there, but the interface also is interactive and allows sample requests to be sent to the actual endpoints.

With the help of Ruby gems such as https://github.com/richhollis/swagger-docs, the JSON files can automatically be generated for you for every controller you want to appear on the documentations page.

Which IDE to use for Ruby / Rails Development? RubyMine

My team loved it and everyone adopted it.

Which #IaaS / #PaaS to chose? Not all #Cloud providers are created equal. As you start to use one or the other, you'll build around very specific services that don't have their equivalent elsewhere.

Back in 2014/2015, this decision I made for SmartZip was a no-brainer and #AWS won. AWS has been a leader, and over the years demonstrated their capacity to innovate, and reducing toil. Like no other.

Year after year, this kept on being confirmed, as they rolled out new (managed) services, got into Serverless with AWS Lambda / FaaS And allowed domains such as #AI / #MachineLearning to be put into the hands of every developers thanks to Amazon Machine Learning or Amazon SageMaker for instance.

Should you compare with #GCP for instance, it's not quite there yet. Building around these managed services, #AWS allowed me to get my developers on a whole new level. Where they know what's under the hood. Where they know they have these services available and can build around them. Where they care and are responsible for operations and security and deployment of what they've worked on.

As a Engineering Manager & Director at SmartZip, I had a mix of front-end, back-end, #mobile engineers reporting to me.

Sprints after sprints, I noticed some inefficiencies on the MobileDev side. People working multiple sprints in a row on their Xcode / Objective-C codebase while some others were working on Android Studio. After which, QA & Product ensured both applications were in sync, on a UI/UX standpoint, creating addional work, which also happened to be extremely costly.

Our resources being so limited, my role was to stop this bleeding and keep my team productive and their time, valuable.

After some analysis, discussions, proof of concepts... etc. We decided to move to a single codebase using React Native so our velocity would increase.

After some initial investment, our initial assumptions were confirmed and we indeed started to ship features a lot faster than ever before. Also, our engineers found a way to perform this upgrade incrementally, so the initial platform-specific codebase wouldn't have to entirely be rewritten at once but only gradually and at will.

Feedback around React Native was very positive. And I doubt - for the kind of application we had - no one would want to go back to two or more code bases. Our application was still as Native as it gets. And no feature or device capability was compromised.

SmartZip

Tech Stack

Application & Data

Utilities

DevOps

Business Tools

Engineering Blog

Stack Decisions