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CompanyCam Helps Contractors Document Their Job

CompanyCam Helps Contractors Document Their Job

with Nick Janetakis and Chad Wilken

Running in Production · Nick Janetakis

November 22, 20211h 5m
Original episode page

Show Notes

In this episode of Running in Production, Chad Wilken goes over building a service to help contractors document their job and communicate with their crew. It’s been up since 2014.

Chad talks about handling ~800k photo uploads per day, building a Rails API driven app, creating a great mobile experience with React Native, handling millions of daily Sidekiq (pro) jobs, transitioning to AWS ECS with Fargate, deploying with Capistrano and so much more.

Topics Include

  • 3:04 – Motivation for switching from .NET to Rails
  • 5:59 – It’s a Rails API with a React front-end, first class mobile support is important
  • 9:34 – What type of screens does this app have?
  • 11:58 – As the CTO, Chad doesn’t get a chance to code as much as he used to
  • 13:15 – A few Rails features and gems being used (interactor, wisper and more)
  • 16:35 – Third party sites that they integrate with
  • 18:11 – Contracting companies are a lot more technical than you might think
  • 22:39 – Every photo upload hits the Rails back-end but it’s not processed there
  • 25:30 – Millions of jobs are being run through Sidekiq per day and payments
  • 28:46 – Spending time on the company admin back-end vs user features
  • 33:20 – Postgres (RDS), MongoDB, Elasticsearch and Redis are being used
  • 36:13 – The Flipper gem is being used for feature flags
  • 37:44 – Docker is being used in development with a transition to using them in production
  • 39:30 – How things are currently deployed and where they’re going with AWS Fargate
  • 41:03 – From Chef to Ansible with Capistrano handling app deployments
  • 43:35 – Ubuntu is their distro of choice
  • 44:00 – Moving over to ECS with Fargate and hiring dedicated ops folks
  • 48:28 – A run down of which AWS resources they’re using
  • 49:25 – The deployment process from development to production
  • 54:59 – All developers on the team can use whichever OS they prefer
  • 55:37 – Handling backups of all user data
  • 58:22 – Logging, error monitoring and alerts
  • 1:01:40 – Best tips? Design patterns are important, so is caching and saying no
  • 1:03:48 – Their AWS bill is about $38,000 a month
  • 1:05:03 – Check out https://companycam.com, they’re hiring!
📄 References
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