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Fundraze Is a Flexible Fund Raising and Campaign Management Service

Fundraze Is a Flexible Fund Raising and Campaign Management Service

with Nick Janetakis and CJ Avilla

Running in Production · Nick Janetakis

September 20, 20211h 3m
Original episode page

Show Notes

In this episode of Running in Production, CJ Avilla goes over building a fund raising platform with Ruby on Rails. It’s hosted on Heroku and has been running in production since 2015.

CJ talks about rewriting an app with Rails, processing $30 million dollars of donations, using Stripe, maintaining a Rails 4.2 app, carefully sending out bulk emails, ensuring good tests are written, keeping things simple and more.

Topics Include

  • 2:26 – Rebuilding a similar app with a new tech stack is easier the 2nd time around
  • 6:14 – Motivation for using Rails and live coding features right next to his client
  • 9:33 – What the app does at a high level and what some of the screens do
  • 12:20 – The app is running Rails 4.2 and it’s humming along with minimal maintenance
  • 13:29 – Stripe handles accepting donations and keeping things as simple as possible
  • 17:33 – Processing over $30 million dollars since the site went live
  • 22:35 – It’s worth checking out which payment providers are available in different countries
  • 24:51 – Using an older version of Stripe’s API but it’s super stable
  • 27:22 – A couple of gems from 2015 which helped build this app
  • 28:50 – (1) standard Heroku Dyno for the web app and (1) 2x size Dyno for the worker
  • 32:15 – Postgres, Redis and Resque are being used along with Heroku’s cron scheduler
  • 35:48 – Sending bulk emails out can be scary
  • 39:42 – Using Rbenv locally to manage things in development
  • 42:42 – The reasons for picking Heroku were mainly to avoid any type of ops work
  • 46:03 – What it’s like to develop a new feature and push it up to production
  • 47:58 – Not doing traditional TDD but tests are still written
  • 51:18 – Heroku is in charge of performing daily database backups
  • 55:40 – Handling background worker spikes with popular donation pages
  • 57:42 – Tagging the current user in Rollbar errors and then emailing customers ASAP
  • 1:00:27 – Best tips? Keeping it simple really drives down your maintenance
  • 1:02:38 – CJ’s has a YouTube channel and a personal site at https://cjav.dev
📄 References
⚙️ Tech Stack
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