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ListenAddict Lets You Subscribe to a Person Like You Would to a Show

ListenAddict Lets You Subscribe to a Person Like You Would to a Show

with Nick Janetakis and David Parker

Running in Production · Nick Janetakis

May 31, 20211h 12m
Original episode page

Show Notes

In this episode of Running in Production, David Parker talks about building a service to subscribe to people with Ruby on Rails and Sapper. It’s hosted on Heroku ($30 / month) and has been up and running since November 2020.

David talks about creating an API back-end with Rails, trying out Svelte and Sapper, the challenges of scraping names from websites, figuring out and fixing PostgreSQL performance issues, finding a good work / life balance and more.

Topics Include

  • 3:27 – Motivation for using Ruby on Rails and Sapper / Svelte
  • 6:18 – Writing raw SQL queries before translating them to ActiveRecord
  • 7:36 – A few Ruby libraries that helped build this project
  • 9:37 – The challenges around scraping human names from various websites
  • 13:17 – The API Rails back-end is a monolithic app with about 100 endpoints
  • 15:44 – David pulls from 94 different sources to find new content
  • 19:06 – The Engtagger gem helps figure out stop words
  • 20:25 – Why did you go with an API back-end?
  • 21:43 – What Svelte and Sapper are and how they help build UIs
  • 25:34 – How the back-end and front-end communicate with each other
  • 28:29 – ~11k LOC on the back-end and ~5 LOC on the front-end
  • 30:49 – At the moment it’s a free service and there’s no ads too
  • 33:23 – What Sidekiq is being used for in terms of background jobs
  • 35:30 – Mailgun is being used to send all transactional emails
  • 37:34 – How the service might be monetized in the future (it’s $30 / month for hosting now)
  • 40:31 – Break down of Heroku Dynos and add-ons
  • 43:17 – Figuring out how to add new people and also using Cloudflare
  • 45:40 – The deployment process from development to production
  • 49:16 – The database is being backed up through Heroku
  • 52:00 – A features table is in the database to enable features for himself
  • 54:37 – Logentries will send out a notification if something goes down
  • 57:50 – What to look out for and how to fix certain performance issues with PostgreSQL
  • 1:01:09 – An example of when to consider breaking up a wide table into multiple tables
  • 1:05:22 – Best tips? Figure out your work / life balance and try the back-end / front-end split
  • 1:11:21 – Find David on Twitter, https://www.programmingtil.com/ and his YouTube channel
📄 References
⚙️ Tech Stack
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