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Games Directory Lets You Sync Your Games and Achievements in 1 Place

Games Directory Lets You Sync Your Games and Achievements in 1 Place

with Nick Janetakis and Vlad Radulescu

Running in Production · Nick Janetakis

August 30, 20211h 6m
Original episode page

Show Notes

In this episode of Running in Production, Vlad Radulescu goes over creating a game directory site with Ruby on Rails. It’s hosted on AWS and has been up and running since 2014.

Vlad talks about having thousands of active users, interfacing with a few game platform APIs, running millions of Sidekiq jobs, storing 10+ billion database records, keeping things as a monolithic app, deploying the web app to 1 server and lots more.

Topics Include

  • 6:30 – Motivation for switching from PHP to Ruby on Rails
  • 7:07 – Figuring out which gaming API to implement first and how their APIs are
  • 10:27 – Reverse engineering undocumented API calls from the Windows Steam client
  • 12:18 – Using a separate database for each gaming platform provider
  • 15:05 – A few useful features of Rails that’s being used and Stimulus Reflex
  • 20:19 – Switching from Webpacker to using Vite
  • 23:14 – Using Slim instead of ERB and a few other gems being used
  • 25:29 – It’s a single monolithic Rails app that’s using namespaces
  • 28:36 – A lot of the time spent developing this app is working with the game APIs
  • 31:00 – Using Sidekiq, a billion (!) gamer activities stored and millions of Sidekiq jobs
  • 34:18 – It’s hosted on a single AWS T2.large instance (4 vCPUs / 16 GB memory)
  • 36:13 – The database is on an R6g.large with 10+ billion records
  • 39:14 – Ansible was used to set up the EC2 instance and it’s running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
  • 41:13 – A couple of AWS resources being used
  • 43:01 – The process to ship a feature from development to production
  • 44:16 – Switching to using TailwindCSS in a nicely controlled way
  • 47:57 – At the moment the site is free with no desire to make it pay to win
  • 49:55 – Hosting is $1,500 pounds a month and it’s been running for free for 7+ years
  • 51:43 – There’s 7 terabytes of S3 storage and daily database backups
  • 55:59 – 50ish mini servers spread across Heroku’s free tier to bypass API rate limits
  • 59:45 – Being dialed into the ops side of things but there’s room for improvement
  • 1:00:54 – Keeping up with a full date job and a long running passion project
  • 1:02:25 – Best tips? Don’t forget to plan things out
  • 1:05:56 – You can find Vlad on Twitter and Games Directory will be open source soon
📄 References
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